The Department of Economics congratulates Dr. Hossein Abbasi and Dr. Naveen Sarna, who have been promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Hossein received his Ph.D. in Economics in 2009 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a program known within the discipline for including formal training on teaching economics.  He joined our professional track faculty as a Lecturer in 2014, after teaching for five years at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.  In addition to teaching six classes a year and playing a lead role in implementing the undergraduate program’s learning outcomes assessment plan, he has also maintained his research in the labor markets of Middle Eastern cultures.

Naveen received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1997 from our own department.  While working on his dissertation he started as a country economist at the World Bank where he continued after graduation for several years, He left to spend two years working as a financial consultant for a Wall Street firm, and then returned as a senior economist at the World Bank for another six years. He came back to the University of Maryland in 2009 as a lecturer.  His wealth of experience outside academia enables him to convey a huge range of real world examples when he teaches, examples which make economic theory more accessible to undergraduate students.