Ph.D. Spotlights

Andres Giraldo

Andres started teaching economics as a junior instructor at the Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) in 2004. He then joined the PhD program at SMU in 2014. After graduating in 2018 under the supervision of Omer Ozak, he returned to Universidad Javeriana where he currently holds the rank of Associate Professor and is the Chair of the department. Although administrative tasks occupy a significant part of his time, he finds time to continue his research in the areas of macroeconomics and long-term development.

Murat Yildiz

Murat completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Kamal Saggi in 2003 and joined the Department of Economics at Ryerson University in Toronto. He was tenured in 2006, promoted to Associate Professor in 2007, promoted to full Professor in 2017. Since 2015, he has been the Graduate Program Director at Ryerson.

Murat's primary research field is international trade. He specializes in using methods from game theory and industrial organization to analyze the reasons why countries form bilateral trade agreements. This allows him to investigate, whether continued formation of bilateral trade agreements will lead to global free trade, and how the formation of bilateral trade agreements affects ongoing global trade negotiations through the World Trade Organization. His research has regularly appeared in leading journals including American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of International Economics, Canadian Journal of Economics, European Economic Review and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

Manan Roy

Manan received her PhD from SMU in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Dan Millimet. After graduation, she was a Research Associate at a policy research firm, IMPAQ International, until 2014. In 2015, she joined the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Postdoctoral Scholar. After a brief tenure as a Research Scientist at the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University from 2016-2017, she joined the Department of Nutrition and Health Care Management at Appalachian State University as an Assistant Professor in 2017. She has collaborated with researchers from the fields of Nutrition, Public Health, Public Policy, Geography, and Epidemiology in addition to Economics. She has published in various journals including Stata Journal, Economic Inquiry, Southern Economic Journal, Empirical Economics, Review of the Economics of the Household, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, Journal of School Health, and Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.