Accounting
Keval Amin is an Associate Professor and the Area Head of Accounting in the College of Business. After completing his doctorate at Temple University, he joined Stony Brook University in 2014. His primary research interest is archival auditing. Particularly, his studies examine the determinants and economic consequences of audit outputs, audit opinion shopping, and investor sentiment. Professor Amin's work has been published in top tier journals including Contemporary Accounting Research, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Accounting Horizons, Journal of Accounting Auditing & Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, and more. His research interests have motivated his teaching of External Auditing, Advanced Auditing, Internal Auditing, Financial Accounting, and Managerial Accounting. Prior to pursuing academia, he was an auditor at Deloitte and EY.
Charles Barragato joined the College of Business in 2014 after spending 28 years on the faculty of the LIU-Post School of Professional Accountancy, where he taught accounting and taxation. He also served as the School’s Director since 2006. He has presented at numerous conferences and has published articles in a host of academic and practitioner journals. Dr. Barragato concentrates his research in the areas of taxation, financial reporting, and agency issues associated with the nonprofit sector. He currently serves as an outside reviewer for Voluntas, and also provides commentary on tax and accounting issues to The Journal of Taxation, The Wall Street Journal, The Long Island Business News, The Trusted Professional and TheStreet.com. He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and holds the Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) designation. Dr. Barragato is also past-president of the NYSSCPAs – Suffolk Chapter. His professional experience includes two and one-half years with KPMG, a global accounting and tax advisory firm.
Christie L. Comunale, Ph.D., CPA is a Professor of Practice at Stony Brook University. She joined Stony Brook University in 2013 after serving 14 years in LIU Post’s School of Professional Accountancy where she held the rank of Professor of Accounting. Dr. Comunale is a licensed CPA in New York State with audit experience at Coopers & Lybrand in Baltimore, MD. She earned her Ph.D. in accounting from the University of South Florida, and her MBA and BS in accounting from Loyola University Maryland. Dr. Comunale is an award-winning researcher in the areas of taxpayer and auditor judgment and decision making, and the efficiency and effectiveness of the audit process. In addition, she has conducted research in the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and related techniques to current issues in business and public policy. Dr. Comunale has presented her research at numerous American Accounting Association meetings and has published in competitive peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Cecilia (Qian) Feng is an associate professor of accounting and serves as the director of MS in Accounting at the College of Business at Stony Brook University. She received her PhD in accounting from the Fox School of Business at Temple University in 2015. She also holds an MBA from the Fox School. Her research interests are in the area of accounting information systems and include topics relating to IT leadership, the SEC’s eXtensible business reporting language (XBRL) mandate, and information security breach incidents. Her papers have been published in leading academic journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Accounting Horizons, Accounting and Business Research, Journal of Information Systems, and International Journal of Information Systems. Dr. Feng is currently serving and will be on the editorial board of Journal of Information Systems from 2023 - 2025. In addition, Dr. Feng is actively serving as a reviewer at various academic journals such as Management Science, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Information Systems Frontiers. She is also presenting, reviewing, discussing, and serving as session chair at national and international academic conferences.
Prior to joining Stony Brook, Francis Kim taught at Wayne State University and City University of Hong Kong. He held membership on the Educational Development Grant Committee in Business School, the Senate Research Sub-committee in Business School, and the Journal List Committee in Accounting at Wayne State. He served as the Ph.D. program coordinator and held membership on the university’s Board of Graduate Studies, the Business Studies Graduate Committee and the Departmental Executive Committee at City University of Hong Kong. His work was published in accounting, finance and international business journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Accounting Horizon, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Financial Management, Journal of Financial Market, Financial Analysts Journal, and Journal of International Business Studies. The foci of his research have been on security analysts' earnings forecasts, corporate political connections, corporate governance, corporate tax aggressiveness, textual analysis and auditing.
Zhifeng Yang, Ph.D., CFA, earned his Ph.D. from University of Alberta. His teaching interests cover corporate governance, financial accounting, and financial statement analysis. The foci of Dr. Yang’s research have been on corporate governance, finance, and auditing issues in emerging markets. Dr. Yang has published in all top four accounting journals - Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, and Contemporary Accounting Research. Dr. Yang is an associate editor of China Journal of Accounting Research and he is a member of the editorial board of China Journal of Accounting Studies.
