News Archive

The UWA Business School's Accounting and Finance discipline has added another four staff to its ranks with the appointments of Winthrop Professor Richard Heaney, Professor Paul Gerrans, Professor Sirimon Treepangkaruna and Associate Professor Inderpal Singh.

The appointments reflect a growing demand by students for Accounting and Finance subjects, with the new Master of Professional Accounting having attracted a significant number of enrolments since its introduction in 2009.

‘We welcome all the new appointments to the discipline and look forward to working with them,' said Winthrop Professor Ray da Silva Rosa, Head of the Accounting and Finance discipline. ‘They are well-respected within academic circles and have a strong portfolio of research in a range of areas that will complement the work currently being carried out at the Business School.

‘The new appointments will allow us to build on our research strengths in funds management research, quantitative finance and behavioural finance. All the appointments have a strong record of successful research collaboration and are team players so we very much look forward to welcoming them to the School.'

Winthrop Professor Richard Heaney will join the School in February 2011 from RMIT, where he currently teaches Strategic Asset Allocation. Professor Heaney's research interests include corporate finance, mutual fund performance, corporate governance, asset pricing, commodity pricing, derivative use and derivative pricing and portfolio theory.

In recent years, Professor Heaney has won a number of research grants, including four in 2010 from the Melbourne Centre for Financial Studies. He has also won two large Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grants in the 2007-09 period for ‘Storage and the Hotelling Valuation Principle: Understanding the Dynamics of the Oil Industry,' and ‘Does Australian Corporate Taxation Matter?' Professor Heaney holds a Bachelor of Commerce, Master in Economics, and PhD in the field of Commerce.

Professor Gerrans joined the Business School in November 2010, arriving from Edith Cowan University. He has previously taught at other institutions, including undertaking a visiting professorship at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Prior to joining academe he worked at the Commonwealth Bank.

At the UWA Business School, Professor Gerrans will engage in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and supervision, lecturing in finance and financial planning. Professor Gerrans will also continue to pursue his primary research interests in superannuation, retirement planning, financial literacy, and individual investment decision making.

In recent years Professor Gerrans has won research funding from a range of sources including the Australian Research Council. Projects to have received funding include: "Building Financial Literacy and Retirement Savings Engagement in the Workplace"; "Choice and Member Responses to the Global Financial Crisis"; and "Financial literacy and attitudes to superannuation among indigenous Australians."

Professor Treepangkaruna arrives from Monash University, having previously held appointments at the Australian National University and Lincoln University. She has also served as an FX dealer and is the past winner of the best paper awards for the 2006 AsiaFA/FMA and the 2008 ABFC.  She also brings with her a successful Discovery ARC grant.

Her research interests include short-term interest rate modelling, FX modelling, high-frequency (tick-by-tick) data modelling, credit risk modelling and regime switching model.

Associate Professor Singh will join the Business School from Curtin University, where he lectures in the School of Accounting. He has previously worked at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu in Perth in the Audit and Assurance division, and as a Financial Controller of a Perth-based mining group. He is also actively involved in the Institute of Chartered Accountant's CA Program as a Focus Session Facilitator. Associate Professor Singh ‘s primary research interests are intellectual capital, initial public offerings, auditing and corporate disclosure.

Media references

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]