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New faculty: Spotlight on two of the new professors who joined the college in the fall of 2007.

School of Accounting welcomes faculty couple.

Divesh Sharma

As a child, Divesh Sharma, associate professor, School of Accounting, “never thought I would go to college,” and Vineeta Sharma, assistant professor, School of Accounting, foresaw a career as a pharmacist. Both from Fiji—a three-hour flight from Australia and described by Divesh as “paradise”—the couple met in high school. With doctorates from Griffith University in Australia, they’ve moved to the United States from New Zealand to be closer to transplanted family and nearer the action in their profession.

“I’ve come to the American Accounting Association’s annual meeting for a decade and wanted to narrow the distance to my research collaborators and increase my awareness of what’s going on in the discipline of accounting—a rapidly growing field in the United States,”  Divesh said. 

Practical experience, teaching, and research all play their part.

Both bring practical experience to students, Divesh as a qualified chartered accountant in Australia who worked for KPMG as an auditor, and Vineeta as a graduate accountant for a small Australian CPA firm.

“Universities need academics with practical experience to enrich what happens in the classroom,” Divesh said. “We can relate to what takes place in practice and also show how research affects practitioners.”

Vineeta Sharma

The partners maintain complementary schedules, with Divesh a self-proclaimed night owl who starts work at about 9:30 p.m. and works till 2:00 a.m., and Vineeta a day person. They also complement each other in terms of their research.

“I handle the theory and literature review since I am up to speed on the current research because of my more recent PhD,” Vineeta said. “Divesh does his own statistical analysis and manages the research assistants who gather data. I then replicate the analyses, consider other variables, and prepare the list of references.”

Working back and forth to evaluate the portions written by the other, the authors fashion a “joint production” in which their separate contributions result in a paper in which the reader cannot distinguish between the two. Among their collaborative efforts, they’ve produced two papers presented at international conferences and currently under review: “The Impact of Corporate Governance on Auditors’ Client Acceptance, Risk, and Planning Judgments,” and “Beyond the Independence of the Corporate Board: the Association between Characteristics of Independent Directors and Dividend Payout.”

Having the same profession affords plusses and minuses.

Though they share a love of teaching as well as research, sharing a profession delivers a mixed experience.

“Our ten-year-old daughter points out that we talk a great deal about work at home,” Vineeta said, and, according to Divesh, “On the positive side, we inform each other because we teach different subjects. We argue when we disagree, but we keep it at the professional level.”