2024

Fei Du

Associate Professor of Accountancy, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Associate Academic Director, Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society

Areas: Accounting Analysis, Computational Thinking, Data Analytics, Financial Analysis

Fei Du is an associate professor of accountancy at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the interaction between users and designers of managerial accounting systems and has been published in top academic journals, including The Accounting Review, the Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research, the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Du teaches courses in data analytics at the graduate level, emphasizing computational thinking and decision making. She leverages Wolfram Language for its powerful capabilities in accessing curated financial and socioeconomic data, which complements traditional accounting metrics. She also integrates real-world capital market events, news and case studies to enhance students’ understanding of business insights.

Du is also the author of Creative Data Analytics: Computational Recipes to Gain Insights into Businesses, published by Wolfram Media. This book features a mouse-driven interface that allows students to input data—ranging from website URLs to images and PDF files—and generate real-time computational results. Her innovative teaching approach integrates text and images from websites, CEO portraits and financial reports, blending traditional financial spreadsheet tools with advanced computational capabilities powered by Wolfram Language.