Blacksburg, VA — Kecia Williams Smith has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.
She is one of five new full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members at Pamplin this fall. Their addition reflects the college’s commitment to hiring such faculty to further strengthen its teaching, research, and business outreach, particularly in the areas of business analytics, innovation through entrepreneurship, and sustainable global prosperity.
Smith received a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2016 and a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina A&T State University.
Her research interests include audit regulation, audit quality, audit market structure, and auditor judgment and decision-making.
Smith’s dissertation examines the readability and tone of the newly required expanded audit report in the United Kingdom. Her works in progress include a study on the determinants and audit quality consequences of small audit firm mergers and an experiment on auditors’ ability to correct for client preferences when auditing estimates.
Her honors and awards include the 2015 AAA/Deloitte Foundation/J. Michael Cook Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 2014 Center for Audit Quality Research Grant, 2013-2015 AICPA Fellowship for Minority Doctoral Students, 2012-2016 KPMG Fellowship, and the 2012 Beta Alpha Psi Business Information Professional of the Year (Industry and Government) Award.
Prior to her academic career, Smith worked as a senior manager at Deloitte and as an associate director at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
She is a certified public accountant licensed in North Carolina and Georgia.
