Turner Business

Beginning this year, CSU's summer academic calendar will no longer include a Maymester option, which was a compact semester tucked in between spring and summer semesters.  Instead, CSU will now offer three distinct summer sessions. In the 8-week option , which the Turner College will be mostly using, classes will run from May 20, 2024, through July 15, 2024. Next, Summer 1stHalf will run from May 20, 2024, through June 20, 2024. Lastly, Summer 2ndHalf will run from June 24, 2024, through July 24, 2024. Please pass this important information along to any CSU students that you know. 

Turner Business was recently on the receiving end of some great news for students. Grants provided by the Turner College to assist business students in covering the costs of the  2024 Ireland Study Abroad program have been increased from $500 to $1,500. Recipients of these grants will receive the stipend through financial aid during the Summer 1 term this May. These payments will operate as a refund check from the CSU Financial Aid Office. In addition to the Turner College grants, CSU offers scholarship funds to successful applicants. Information about these grants will be sent to students after they complete the application forms and pay the $200 application fee, which will be applied to the total cost of the program.  To take advantage of the larger grant amounts, students are urged to apply now.  The deadline for applications is Friday, February 9th.

The TSYS  Center For Cybersecurity at CSU  often hosts monthly meetings of the Columbus chapter of the Information Systems Security Association.  The 2024 kickoff meeting was one of the biggest crowds ever. Participants received an overview of the upcoming year and were able to participate in the SANS Institute  Holiday Hack Cybersecurity Challenge. "Thanks to club president and cybersecurity Nexus graduate Benjamin Price  for putting it all together. [This was a g]reat opportunity for students and professionals to mix and get to know each other," stated Patrick Aiken , Director of the TSYS Center for Cybersecurity.

As a MyLife Associate at ADP, Ayana Owens  assists the company in providing  industry-leading online payroll and HR solutions, in addition to tax, compliance, and benefits administration. In this position she is honing her skills in customer relationship management and complex problem solving. A solid foundation for these experiences was built by Ayana in CSU's Turner College of Business and Technology. She  earned a BBA in management from the Turner College in 2021, while working as a sales assistant at Orangetheory Fitness. From there she worked as a management trainee at Enterprise, and later as a Student Admissions Representative for the Legacy Holistic Health Institute. Each of these professional experiences has been enhanced by Ayana's philanthropic pursuits, as she  has served as a mentor for both Ambassadors of Compassion and Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America.  Turner Business salutes Ayana and wishes her continued professional success.

Turner Business congratulates Brooke Quarterman on her recent promotion to Lead Admissions Specialist at CSU. Quarterman was previously the Coordinator of International Education at CSU, a position she began in September of 2021. Brooke earned a BBA in human resources management from the Turner College in 2015. She subsequently earned an MEd in higher education administration from CSU in 2020. Best wishes to Brooke going forward in this new position.

The countdown is underway for the Spring 2024 Turner College Career Fair. Set for 10:00am through 2:00pm on Tuesday, February 20, 2024, in the Synovus Center on CSU's main campus, the Turner College Career Fair is always an excellent opportunity to  network with top-notch companies looking for bright talent, explore internship opportunities and full-time positions, and connect with industry leaders. Interested students are requested to register for the event on Handshake. Turner Business hopes to see you there.

The initial meeting of the Columbus chapter of Women in Technology was a big success, and representative Kaylee Dodson , a Nexus cybersecurity student, informed Turner Business that she is excited about the chapter's upcoming events.  If you attend CSU and want to get involved with a technology club, please contact Kaylee. "I’ll help get you connected to some amazing people," Kaylee added.

Turner College grad, Julissa Santoyo , is on the rise again at Synovus in Atlanta. Julissa was recently  promoted to Commercial Banker within Synovus' Central Atlanta team. In announcing the promotion, Christie Neuman, Business Development Coordinator at Synovus, stated,  "This well-deserved advancement recognizes Julissa's exceptional skills, dedication, and contributions to the organization." Regular readers of Turner Business  are quite familiar with Santoyo's academic and professional accomplishments.  In September of 2022, she was the subject of an Alumni Focus installment  here at Turner Business .  That particular piece referred to an interview we conducted with her near the end of her senior year in the Turner College. A subsequent story  (in November of 2022) on Julissa focused on her academic research, noting that she has published research appearing in both Frontiers in Education and Managerial and Decision Economics . Cheers to Julissa on ...

The Turner College, in conjunction with the CSU Alumni Association, is hosting a mixer with Turner College alumni, faculty, and current students. The mixer will take place on Thursday, February 8th from 6:00pm through 7:00pm in the Synovus Center on CSU's main campus.  This event is an excellent opportunity for Turner College students and alumni to network with each other to help foster student success. There will be an opportunity for Q&A, while light bites and drinks will be available.  Turner Business urges all current Turner College and TSYS School students to attend, and to be on the lookout for alumni and students who have been featured on the pages of Turner Business .

The Royal Society is Britain’s oldest scientific institution. Founded in 1660, it stands as a testament to the eminence of science and a mirror of scientific and intellectual life in Britain. A  recent issue of Nature includes  an interesting correspondence demonstrating that Presidents of the Royal Society not only tend to outlive other Royal Society Fellows but also British Prime Ministers. To support the claim, the authors of the correspondence analyzed records of the Royal Society to compare the lifespans of the Society’s 59 deceased Presidents with those of senior statesmen and Royal Society Fellows from 1622 to 2018. They found that the Royal Society Presidents lived to an average age of 77 years, which exceeded the lifespans of 49 deceased British Prime Ministers and 7,665 deceased Royal Society Fellows.      A new study appearing in Scientometrics by Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his coauthors Ho Chai Fan and Benno Torgler of Queensland Univ...

Yesterday, the deans of CSU's Turner College of Business & Technology and UGA's Terry College of Business hosted more than 200 local business leaders for an analysis of Georgia’s 2024 economic outlook. The event was part of the UGA Terry College of Business’ annual economic outlook statewide tour designed to share insights into the national, state and local factors shaping the economy for the coming year. Turner College Dean Deb Kidder   headlined the lunchtime event with Terry College Dean Benjamin Ayers, who  declared that the state’s economy is heading for a “soft landing” in 2024 as it fully recovers from some COVID-era challenges, while also outpacing the nation in several key performance indicators.      “Georgia is well positioned to weather an economic slowdown and our economy will outperform the U.S. economy,” Ayers said, drawing from analysis by economic forecasters in UGA’s Selig Center for Economic Growth. “The build-out of many large projects in...

It has been some time since Turner Business has surveyed the Google Scholar citations portfolio of Turner College business faculty. Heading into 2024, the 24 faculty comprising the corps of business instruction for the Turner College have produced scholarship that has garnered 17,260 Google Scholar citations. These figures produce a mean citation count of 719. Including all 28 business faculty in the Turner College raises total citations to 22,183, and mean citations to 792.  When the data are broken down by department,  the 14 faculty comprising the corps of instruction of the Department of Management and Marketing, which also includes Management Information Systems faculty, have produced 10,829 Google Scholar citations. These numbers produce a mean citation count of 774. When all 16 members of this department are included, these numbers are 15,550 and 972, respectively.  Next, the 10 faculty comprising the corps of instruction of the Department of Accounting and Financ...

TSYS School grad Roderick Sellers of Peachtree City has been qualified to work in the cybersecurity field for only a short time, but already he has gained some interesting professional experience in the field. After graduating in 2019 from the University of West Georgia with a bachelor's degree in management information systems, Sellers then entered the TSYS School's M.S. program in cybersecurity management, which he completed in 2020. That same year Roderick joined Fiverr, a global platform connecting businesses with freelance talent, as a freelance blockchain developer. That connection led to a contract position in 2021 as a system engineer with Delta Airlines. In this position, he was responsible for implementation and support of hardware platforms, operating systems, software, and system tools, as well as for identifying gaps in monitoring and documentation, and then working with appropriate teams to fill those gaps. As Sellers explains, "My focus on innova...

TSYS School alum, Nigel Miller , now the Deputy Chief Information Security Officer of Maximus, recently visited the Synovus Center on CSU's main campus to speak with Nexus cybersecurity students about his career and to offer advice as they prepare to enter the cybersecurity industry.  "This is one of my favorite speaking opportunities. These students have such passion for the field. This is a fantastic program training the future of cybersecurity," explained Miller, who earned a B.S. in computer science from the TSYS School in 2006. He also earned an M.S. in computer science from the TSYS School in 2012. Current Nexus students were able to ask questions of, and even have some small group discussion time, with Miller after the presentation. Patrick Aiken , Director of the TSYS Center for Cybersecurity, described Miller's visit to the Turner College as informative and inspiring. " The students had positive comments about his visit, for sure," Aiken added.  

Turner Business congratulates retired W.C. Bradley president Mat Swift for being appointed as a board member of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. This volunteer body governs Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities, including CSU.  “Regent Swift is going to do a tremendous job, and it is always a real advantage to have someone who lives in your community to be sitting on the Board of Regents. [His] engagement and participation and economic development for the state is going to be tremendously helpful as the Board of Regents considers new degree programs [and] new facilities," stated CSU President Stuart Rayfield.  Swift has made a great impact on our Columbus community. Due to his previous work in the downtown Columbus area, Columbus boasts the world’s longest urban white water rafting experience, renovated riverfront housing, and thriving small businesses. 

A new study by TSYS School faculty Mohamed Riduan Abid and Yesem Peker  develops  a real-world smart building energy fault detection system on a cloud-based workspace. Developed within one calendar year, t he system currently provides fault detection in the form of predictions and anomaly detection for 96 buildings on an active military installation, all which is capable of converging within 14 minutes on average. The study, which appears in the current issue of Computers , was coauthored with TSYS School students Kaleb Horvath , Thomas Merino , and Ryan Zimmerman , along with Shamim Khan , who recently retired from the TSYS School. The paper  outlines their system's general architecture and how it differs from previous smart building diagnostics initiatives. It also  provides the necessary configuration steps required to maintain and develop a big data analytics application in the cloud like that discussed in the study.

New details have been released regarding the relocation of the Atlanta Braves AA team to Columbus. As part of the plan to move the Atlanta Braves AA franchise from Pearl, Mississippi, to Columbus, Georgia, following the 2024 season, the Columbus Consolidated Government approved a $50 million bond issue as part of a $300 million project to upgrade Golden Park, Columbus' minor league stadium, and the South Commons softball complex.       As Turner College Dean Deb Kidder  recently announced on the college's weekly vlog, Turner Tuesday , Director of the Butler Center for Business and Economic Research, Fady Mansour , played a key role in the project's approach. The City of Columbus relied on Mansour's economic impact study, projecting that the project would generate $475 million in output (direct, indirect, and induced), increase economic activity in the Columbus area by $260 million, including $179 million in labor income, and create 3,934 new jobs. On an ong...

Columbus State University is offering grants for students engaged in research, scholarly and creative activities under the direction of faculty. The purpose of these grants is to support and promote such efforts by CSU students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The deadline for Spring 2024 submission is February 9th. Applications should include the proposed project's title and a 200-word summary. The project's description should include its goal, methodology, dissemination plan, timeline and proposed budget.  An online statement of support from the faculty mentor describing the applicant's aptitude for the proposed research or creative endeavor and the merit of the project is required. The applicant's department Chair must approve the application online by the submission deadline. Turner College students who are interested in this program, and who may have questions, should contact Rania Hodhod , Chair of the TSYS School of Computer Science.

Turner College management professor Kirk Heriot , holder of the Crowley Chair in Entrepreneurship, has released an informational video that should be helpful to students who are considering the 2024 Study Abroad Program in Ireland, which is set for May 2024. The video, accessible by the above link, is only about nine minutes in length, yet includes detailed information on cost, potential business course credits, trip itinerary, business and cultural activities, walking tours and an optional excursion to Belfast, Northern Ireland. "This is a unique opportunity . . . to have fun while learning. Participating in study abroad also distinguishes students . . . which can be useful in a job interview setting," Heriot stated.

Former Turner College student Tamara Todorova , now an associate professor of economics at American University in Bulgaria (AUB), recently published a study on corporate culture and strategy. Todorova earned an MBA from the Turner College in 1996 and then went on to earn a doctorate in international economics from the University of Economics - Varna in 2001. She has been on the faculty at AUB since August of 2000. Todorova's study, which appears in the current issue of the International Journal of Business Performance Management , investigates how corporate culture helps to economize on the transaction costs of internal organization. As she explains, the dimensions of corporate culture that assist in this task include increasing trust and reducing intrafirm opportunism. Todorova's study demonstrates that setting common goals and a common direction reduces the sizeable costs of internal organization. Tamara's prior research appears in Economics of Transition , International ...

The TSYS School's cybersecurity Nexus program continues to produce success stories. The latest involves Carter Dennard , a recent graduate who just accepted employment with Global Payments Inc. as an Information Security Analyst. " I can't believe that two years ago, I was in high school putting in work for [cybersecurity] certifications that would pay off just two years later," he stated. Carter credits a number of individuals for assisting in his journey, including Patrick Aiken , Director of the TSYS Center for Cybersecurity, and the Nexus cybersecurity program instructors Armando Fernandez and Elke Brumbaugh . He also singled out for credit former TSYS School students Jonathan White , an Information Security Manager at TSYS, and Justin Heath , Associate Director at Global Payments Inc., for their guidance during his recent internship with the company.  "I'm incredibly grateful for the chance to join the team," Dennard added. 

With high scalability and flexibility, serverless computing is becoming a promising computing model. However, as pointed out in a new study by TSYS School computer scientist Yi Zhou , e xisting serverless computing platforms initiate a container for each function invocation, which leads to a huge waste of computing resources. Examinations by Zhou and colleagues from Jinan University and Auburn University reveal that  executing invocations concurrently within a single container can provide comparable performance to that provided by multiple containers (i.e., traditional approaches) while reducing memory resource waste and longer execution times. The researchers propose such a framework, FaaSBatch, that batches invocations and minimizes resource utilization by mapping groups of batched invocations into a single container. According to Zhou, " We evaluated the effectiveness and performance of FaaSBatch by comparing it to three state-of-the-art schedulers. Our experimental results sho...

The Columbus Consolidated Government recently voted to approve a $50 million renovation to Golden Park as part of a plan to relocate the Atlanta Braves AA team from Pearl, Mississippi, to Columbus, Georgia, after the 2024 season. As reported by Turner College Dean Deb Kidder in her recent Turner Tuesday podcast, the Director of the Turner College's Butler Center for Business and Economic Research, Fady Mansour , was instrumental in the plan's approval. Mansour authored the economic impact study for the project, which indicated that the plan would boost economic activity in the greater Columbus area by $350 million. According to Columbus Mayor Skip Henderson,  “This is an exciting day for Columbus and the result of hard work and dedication from a number of parties invested in the future of our community . . . This project, anchored by the return of professional, affiliated baseball to Columbus, will have a transformative impact on not only our downtown area but the lives of ou...

In their new study appearing in the Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics , Turner College management faculty Robin Snipes and Phil Bryant point that since the 1990’s, the concept of workplace spirituality has grown in popularity. According to Snipes, "Contrary to the public notion of spirituality, workplace spirituality does not have much to do with organized religion but more with the connectedness one has with other people at work. During the COVID-19 pandemic this sense of connectedness waned, leaving employees with a lower attachment to their organizations." The study, also co-authored by CSU graduate  Bobbie Bannerman , indicates that workplace spirituality has been correlated with employee job satisfaction, which impacts productivity, customer satisfaction, turnover, and ultimately the firm’s bottom line. The researchers also point out that job satisfaction also has an impact on one’s overall life satisfaction. T he researchers examined data from 224 upper-lev...

Clinical academic positions and other non-tenure track positions are becoming more prevalent in U.S. economics departments. In fact, research indicates that the average economics department currently employs almost the same number of tenure-track assistant professors as non-tenure track professors.  The teaching focus and contingent character of clinical faculty positions are clearly stated in their job descriptions, and they are typically employed to allow traditional tenure-track faculty to concentrate more on academic research.  Student evaluations of teaching are a standard component of the way colleges and universities assess the quality of an instructor’s teaching for purposes of promotion and tenure, merit raise allocations, and reappointment. This fact motivated Turner College accounting faculty Jasmine Bordere and Fonda Carter to explore how  clinical faculty in economics, which are considered teaching specialists, stack up against traditional economics facult...

The spring 2024 CSU grants cycle has commenced, and interested applicants are encouraged to speak with a CSU Faculty Development Committee member before submitting their materials. Members from the Turner College include management professor Johnny Ho , marketing professor Sungwoo Jung and assistant professor of computer science Yi Zhou . Grant applications must be submitted to department chairs by January 26th, while grant recipients will be announced on March 8th.

The recent naming of Fady Mansour as the new Director of the Butler Center for Business and Economic Research was the first step in reinvigorating the Turner College's outreach with the local economy. The Butler Center is now looking to hire a student assistant  who is interested in helping with the marketing of the center and its services. The successful applicant is expected to p rovide excellent customer service to CSU students and employees, as well as members of the public in-person and on the phone, copying, scanning, data entry, and other administrative duties.  Qualified candidates should have a strong understanding of using Excel for business calculations and analysis as well as great communication skills and marketing skills and the knowledge of running a webpage and social media pages. The position pays  $15.00/hour and requires 15-20 hours per week. The successful applicant's w ork schedule will be based around his or her class schedule.

Set for May 2024, the Turner College's upcoming study abroad program set for Ireland is inching closer. Faculty sponsor Kirk Heriot will be visiting classes during the first few weeks of the new semester for about five minutes in order to inform students about the particulars of the program. For maximum impact he hopes to visit 2000- and 3000-level courses that have larger enrollments. Turner College faculty also have an incentive to invite Heriot to speak to classes about the program. "If I visit your class, then your name will be entered into a random drawing for a $20 gift card from Chick-fil-A," Heriot stated.

The newest cohort of Nexus cybersecurity students in the TSYS School recently completed orientation. That process, which begins  with an introduction to the strong community within and surrounding the program, includes presentations from student members of other current cohorts the provide tips on how to succeed within the program. According to Patrick Aiken , Director of the TSYS Center of Cybersecurity, " It was extra special to have some Nexus graduates who are now working in cybersecurity for Global Payments and Synovus.  One of our wonderful industry partners, Jonathan White,  manager of Global Security Operations Center at Global Payments, also joined us to share his insights about the industry and his thoughts about the Nexus program."

Spring semester 2024 in the Turner College at CSU is up and running. As with most semesters, departmental meetings are taking place both this week and next. Departmental meetings will be held tomorrow, with the Department of Accounting and Finance beginning at 1:00pm and the Department of Management and Marketing beginning at 2:00pm.  The Department of Accounting and Finance is led by finance professor Gisung Moon , who is in his first year at the helm.  The Department of Management and Marketing is led by business administration professor John Finley . Turner College Dean Deb Kidder will be visiting both meetings.   

The Turner College's Department of Accounting and Finance welcomes Melissa Ingle Hammer , who joins the group as an adjunct faculty in finance.  Hammer graduated from the Turner College in 2005, after earning a BBA in finance. She later went on to earn an MBA from Auburn University, a Specialist Certificate in Conduct Risk from the University of Manchester, a Certificate in Team Culture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Certificate in Executive Presence from Cornell University. Hammer is the SVP of Fair Lending Product Management with RiskExec at Asurity. She previously worked as Compliance Manager of Fair Lending at Synovus, a senior regulatory consultant with Wolters Kluwer, and as VP of Compliance at TD. This semester Hammer will be teaching FINC 3135, Financial Institutions and Technologies. Turner Business  welcomes Melissa and wishes her a great first semester in the Turner College.

As mentioned previously by Turner Business , the Turner College's 5-year AACSB review is coming in March.  Previous posts have also discussed the College's research and teaching credentials. The research portfolio, which spans the 2018-2022 period, consists of 164 journal publication credits, including 49 A-rated journal publication credits and 46 B-rated journal publication credits.  Stay tuned for more AACSB news in the coming weeks.

Soldiers in the U.S. Army's Captains Career Course are lining up to begin the Turner College's master's degree program in organizational leadership (MSOL). Just a few days ago more than 150 Maneuver Captain Career Course soldiers were briefed by CSU on what the program offers potential entrants. This year the Turner College continues its more than 12 years of partnership with the Maneuver Center of Excellence’s Captains Career Course in providing an opportunity to pursue a master's degree in parallel with the course. Completion of the MCCC provides nine transfer credit hours into the Turner College's MSOL program, thus allowing a soldier the ability to complete seven courses with the Turner College in order to gain their MSOL degree. The program is fully online as well as in person, so the MCCC graduate can complete the program wherever the U.S. Army sends them.

The Turner College recently received a visit from Avery Rozar, the CEO of TrollEye Security. Rozar was inspired to visit the TSYS Center for Cybersecurity and its director, Patrick Aiken , after hiring, and being impressed by, Nexus Cohort 7 graduate Elliot Thompson . In Rozar has been so impressed by Thompson that he interviewed other Nexus students during his recent visit. According to Aiken,  "This is a pattern that keeps repeating when more hiring managers from different companies realize how well the Nexus program prepares our graduates to step right in and start being productive."      As a  Penetration Tester at TrollEye Security, Elliot provides thorough security assessments to uncover vulnerabilities and potential risks for clients' systems and networks. He and his team at TrollEye Security u tilize cutting edge tools and techniques to provide actionable insights and remediation strategies to fortify their clients' security postures.  Aiken encoura...

The Turner College is set to host two listening sessions related to the search for CSU's next provost. Each of the listening sessions will be guided by Ann Yates, a representative with the search firm Buffkin/Baker, which is leading CSU's provost search. The two listening sessions will take place in the Synovus Center Theater on Monday, January 8, from 11:00am-11:50am and from 4:00pm-4:50pm. Representing the Turner College on the 14-member search committee are Tesa Leonce-Regalado , Associate Dean of the Turner College, and Lydia Ray , professor of computer science in the TSYS School.  

Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger consisting of blocks that are chained together via cryptographic hash functions.  A new study by TSYS School professor Yesem Kurt Peker and colleagues from TOBB University in Turkey proposes a blockchain-based architecture that uses smart contracts and homomorphic encryption to allow statistical computations on confidential data by third parties.  As they explain in the study, which appears in the Journal of Millimeterwave Communication, Optimization and Modelling , the use of blockchain provides the much-desired security properties of integrity and fault tolerance while homomorphic encryption preserves the privacy of the data. Results discussed by the researchers show that a blockchain-based data sharing mechanism with homomorphic calculations via a smart contract is feasible and provides improvements in protecting the data from unauthorized users. "Even though our work focused on linear regression, the architecture can be used fo...

Information granules, which  are collections of entities that usually originate at the numeric level and are arranged together due to their similarity, functional or physical adjacency, indistinguishability, or coherency, are effective in revealing the structure of data. Therefore, it is a common practice in data mining to use information granules for classifying datasets. A new study by TSYS School computer scientist Yi Zhou and his colleagues from Jinan University and the University of Exeter  utilizes the feature weighting of data to produce information granules with a high consistency rate. As a first step, Zhou and his co-authors  use consistency rate and contribution scores to generate information granules. Next, they  propose a granular two-stage classifier that  divides the data into fuzzy and fixed points and then calculates the interval matching degree to assign data points to the most suitable cluster. Zhou and his colleagues ultimately compare their...

With the advent of digitized patient healthcare data, a critical subject of concern is system vulnerability to insider attack and recurrent data breaches. New research by Turner College management professor Johnny Ho and his colleagues from Auburn University at Montgomery asserts that a nuanced approach is required to close insider vulnerability incidences, which seem to be impervious to blockchain,  biometrics, and firewalls. In a study set to appear in a future issue of Health and Technology , Ho and his colleagues propose  the adoption of a Zero Trust Model to pacify the loopholes allowed by other attempts to deal with data breaches. The  Zero Trust model is based on context and continuous user and device authentication and verification and employs deduction engines to provide patient data security.