Short biographies and description of research interests of selected doctoral students are following:
Ms. Riina Kerner
Riina is a PhD student in the doctoral program of management at Estonian Business School. Her research is focused on services trading patterns and their factors on the micro level, with the purpose to identify and describe the dependencies between the firms´ typology and the way how the services are delivered to the foreign customer (cross-border or establishing an affiliation abroad). Due to the information and communication technology development, firms trade cross-border in software, healthcare, legal, education and other services much more frequently than before, however sometimes services supply requires also the presence of physical reality. Her research sheds light to the relationship between the type of firm and the services trading pattern. Riina holds a Master's degree in social sciences from the University of Tartu with the thesis “The role of the structure of exports in the formation of competitiveness of Estonian manufacturing sectors”. Her career also supports the further investigation of internationalization among firms. For the last six years, she worked in the community of international services trade statistics in Eurostat (Statistical Office of European Union), and currently she is working in Statistics Estonia to manage international cooperation activities. There, she has worked also as the analyst-statistician in the domain of international trade in goods. She has also contributed to the medical research of Parkinson disease cohort analysis.
Mr. Juan Saenz-Diez
Juan is a PhD student in the Doctoral Program in Management at Estonian Business School. His research interests include strategic management of professional service firms, intelligent automation, and wealth management. These broad areas coalesce in the doctoral research of robo-advisory firms, taking a futures study approach to managerial challenges in the context of fully automated professional firms. Juan graduated cum laude in the EBS Masters program in International Business Administration with the thesis "Low-Risk Anomaly and Risk Control in the Baltic Stock Market". He created the specialization in Finance for the Master's degree at EBS. Juan has been a lecturer in the Economics and Finance department since 2015, teaching and supervising thesis for graduate and undergraduate students in Tallinn and Helsinki. He manages the Centre for Free Economic Thought at EBS, which promotes and facilitates open discussion and study of free markets and innovative entrepreneurship from a classical liberal perspective.
Ms. Ebe Nõmm
Ebe pursues doctoral studies at EBS where her dissertation focuses on health care financing. Her research aims to find a more optimal and future-proof solutions for financing the provision of health care which is one of the key societal challenges in Estonia. Previously, she has worked as finance manager for many years with a successful track record of handling high volume transactions on a regular basis. She has served in senior finance management positions of companies with international and public operations. Her past work experience has been mainly in large corporate organizations in the areas of financial intermediation and auditing, energy, metal industry, forestry/timber industry and most importantly, medicine. Besides Ebe’s industry knowledge and experience, she obtained the second Master’s degree from Stockholm School of Economics (Riga) Diploma of Executive Master of Business Administration.
The Estonian Business School is very thankful to Ms. Helgi Soutar and Montreal Economic Institute for their contribution to the support scheme for doctoral students, which allows EBS to support PhD candidates on a more equal terms with publicly funded universities.
The bursaries were launched in 2019 thanks to generous support from Ms. Helgi Soutar who was born in Estonia and lives in Montreal, Canada. In 2019 the bursaries were awarded to Kristiina Esop, Renee Pesor and Jenny Silfver.
For further information, please contact Professor Meelis Kitsing, Rector at Estonian Business School at meelis.kitsing@ebs.ee.
