It's a reunion 10 years in the making for Stephanie Grant. After completing her PhD in accounting at the University of Illinois in 2016, Grant returns to Gies College of Business as an associate professor of accountancy.

Since earning her PhD, Grant has spent the last decade in Seattle, moving up the ranks of the accounting department at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

“Returning to Gies Business was a pretty easy decision,” Grant said. “I knew I wanted to do experimental accounting research and there isn’t a better place to do that than Illinois.”

Besides the professional appeal, Grant remembers how special the people were at Gies Business.

“There were five in my (PhD) cohort, and we were really close,” Grant recalled. “In going through the grueling coursework together and learning how to get our legs under us as academics, it was the people who made the experience for me.”

Among those influential figures who helped define Grant's career path is Brooke Elliott, Josef and Margot Lakonishok Professor in Business and Dean of Gies Business.

“I came in thinking I was going to do audit research, then I TA’d for Brooke, who encouraged me to pursue financial research,” Grant said. “She took me under her wing and taught me most everything I know.”

Grant also noticed how much work Elliott and others were able to accomplish on their mobile devices, which inspired her doctoral dissertation topic on how investors might make different decisions on their phone than their computer. It turns out that research was ahead of her time. Grant remembers that even in 2016, people were skeptical that investors would choose to make transactions on their phone. Fast forward 10 years, and the apps available to make investment decisions have exploded.

“No one would argue now that with apps like Robinhood, for example, retail investors are using their phones significantly more today,” Grant said.

Connections at Washington, which included colleagues she was already doing research with, helped lead Grant to UW to continue her academic career there.

“While it’s a smaller group, UW also has a reputation for being collegial and welcoming,” Grant said. “Plus, Seattle is pretty amazing.”

At UW, Grant worked closely with Frank Hodge, who is now the Orin & Janet Smith Dean of UW’s Foster School of Business.

“My mentors keep turning into deans,” Grant quipped.

Over the years, Grant has developed a passion for delivering curriculum with inclusivity in mind. For instance, among Grant’s most recent working papers, “Gamified Feedback in Financial Education, ADHD, and Investment Decision-making” suggests that using gamification in financial education, with the proper guardrails, will enhance engagement for those with ADHD and, in the right circumstances, can improve future investment decision-making for them.

“There are so many retail investors entering the markets right now, and many of them don’t have the tools to be successful,” Grant said. “We are looking at ways to improve investor education, which will have the potential to lead to better investment decisions. At the same time, we want to make sure new educational features are also helpful for individuals with ADHD. We found that when we put up some guardrails and structures around the process, they applied their knowledge and made better decisions.”  

Although Grant has expanded her research focus, in some ways, she hasn’t veered far from her base. Some of her most recent work concludes that investors are more likely to make impulsive decisions when they swipe versus when they click to confirm a transaction.

“Swiping is just kind of fun, so much so that it doesn’t feel like you’re actually spending money,” Grant noted. “When you’re clicking and confirming something, it’s much more obvious that you’re spending money, and you realize how much you’re spending. When you’re swiping, that barrier disappears, so you just go for it.”

Prior to her time at Illinois and Washington, Grant was an Audit Senior Associate at Deloitte & Touche LLP in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the Business/Accounting Department Chair at Kaplan University. Family circumstances have led Grant to relocate to North Carolina, where, unlike in Seattle, she’ll need to drive a couple of hours to the coast to continue her passion for scuba diving and her search for Wrecks and Megalodon (an extinct shark) teeth.

Although Grant will mostly be able to work from the Tar Heel State, she will be on campus about every other week during the semester to teach an in-person experimental accounting seminar and to work with PhD students and junior faculty.

“Once I knew personally about the move, there was only one school that I thought of, and that was Illinois. It is clearly the best fit for how I think about accounting education and research,” Grant said.

A difference between Foster and Gies Business is its size; at UW, Grant was only one of two financial experimental faculty. She is looking forward to expanding that reach at Gies, where she is aware of several faculty members, such as Alex Vandenberg, Kim Mendoza, Cassie Mongold, and Sebastian Stirnkorb, who intersect with her research interests.

"One of the things that drew me back to Illinois," Grant said, "was just how innovative the school is from top to bottom.”