Financial Management Director Dr. Irena Vodenska Among BU’s Select Promotions to Full Professor
Dr. Irena Vodenska, who joined Boston University’s Metropolitan College as an assistant professor in 2009, became an associate professor in 2016, and serves as director of the MS in Financial Management program in Administrative Sciences, has been promoted to professor of finance, in recognition of her many accomplishments and contributions to the College and University.
She is among the 19 faculty on BU’s Charles River Campus promoted to full professorship after the unique complexities of 2020. Speaking with BU Today, Jean Morrison, University provost and chief academic officer, credited the class of newly minted professors for their leadership in research, teaching, and innovation over a notably challenging year.
In addition to the wide range of courses she teaches, Dr. Vodenska has been responsible for coordinating a comprehensive revision of the Finance curriculum, guiding its growth as it became MET’s largest management program. She has introduced innovative pedagogy supported by state-of-the-art educational technologies to improve and enhance student learning experiences. She also established a prestigious partnership with the Chartered Financial Analyst® Institute, which has helped to align the curriculum with the CFA® Program Candidate Body of Knowledge™ (CBOK), and allowed MET to offer student scholarships for the CFA® Program exams. Additionally, she has served on many committees for the Administrative Sciences department, the College, and the University.
Outside of teaching, pedagogy, and service to the University, Dr. Vodenska has also distinguished herself as an internationally recognized scholar for her research in econophysics and applications of network theory on complex economic systems. She seeks to understand and predict the volatility dynamics of financial markets and bank failures. By their very nature, the questions raised in this research are interdisciplinary, and econophysics draws on approaches and techniques from statistical physics, dynamic networks, and economics.
Despite the well-known difficulties of originating and sustaining multidisciplinary research, Dr. Vodenska has established a successful close collaboration with BU’s College of Arts & Sciences Physics department and broadened the connection to include international institutions. Though funding for finance research is relatively limited, Dr. Vodenska has been successful in securing over $600,000 in external funding. She is currently the PI for BU on a US Department of Defense, Army Research Office (ARO) grant supporting student and faculty participation at the international conference of Network Science. She is the lead author on more than half of her technical publications and her work, much of it written collaboratively, has been published in highly respected journals and is extensively cited.
By showing promise, progress in research, and strong development, Dr. Vodenska set her course for growth, like so many BU MET students. To learn more about her research, visit Dr. Vodenska’s faculty page. For more about BU’s newest full professors, visit BU Today.