New Faculty Roles for Five African Americans at Southern Universities

Mfon Akpan is a new assistant professor of accounting at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He had been teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. He is the author of the educational technology book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Virtual Reality (St. Petersburg Publishing, 2020).

Akpan is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He holds a master’s degree in accounting from the Keller Graduate School of Management and is a doctoral candidate in accounting at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Charreau Bell, a senior data scientist at the Vanderbilt Data Science Institute and research assistant professor of computer science, has been named the faculty director of the undergraduate data science minor.

Dr. Bell holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University.

Robbie Morganfield was appointed interim chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at North Carolina A&T State University. He joined the faculty in 2020 as the Janice Bryant Howroyd/News & Record Endowed Professor. Earlier, he was the mass communication department head and Cleo Fields Endowed Professor at Grambling State University in Louisiana.

Professor Morganfield earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Mississippi. He holds a master’s degree in public affairs journalism from Ohio State University, a master of divinity degree from Texas Christian University, and a Ph.D. in journalism and public communication from the University of Maryland.

Stephanie Yates, the Regions Institute for Financial Education Endowed Professor in the School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has been named chair of the department of accounting and finance. Dr. Yates joined the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2007 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where she served as a clinical assistant professor.

Dr. Yates earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing, an MBA in accounting, and a master’s degree in international economics from the University of Cincinnati. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from Louisiana State University.

 

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