Isenberg PhD Graduate and Dissertation Co-directors Earn National Honor

Isenberg PhD graduate Mary Catherine Dodgson ’17 and her dissertation co-directors, Christopher Agoglia and Bradley Bennett, received top honors for her dissertation in the American Accounting Association’s Accounting, Behavior and Organizations Section at its 2018 Research Conference in October. The bottom line: the AAA recognized Mary Kate and her co-directors for 2018’s premier dissertation in behavioral accounting. That opus—“Navigating the Audit-Client Relationship during Sensitive Events”—reflects Mary Kate’s research and teaching interests in judgment and decision making. For the Isenberg graduate, those pursuits target auditor-client relationships and negotiations, auditor independence, and professional skepticism.

In Isenberg’s PhD program, Mary Kate earned the school’s Outstanding Doctoral Student Teaching Award in 2016. After graduation, she joined the faculty of Northeastern University’s D'Amore-McKim School of Business as an assistant professor, where her teaching interests include both behavioral and financial accounting. Before Isenberg, Mary Kate worked in public accounting at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Isenberg is a national leader in audit judgment and decision making research. Four senior professors—David Piercey, Chris Agoglia, Elaine Wang, and Bradley Bennett—and an outstanding junior faculty have been magnets for outstanding PhD students—Mary Kate Dodgson included.