About

Derek was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. After graduating from the University of Alberta in 1994 he worked for the provincial Auditor General of Alberta from 1994 to 1996 before becoming a senior accountant at KPMG (in Edmonton) from 1996 to 1997. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Alberta for 1998 and 1999 before beginning his PhD at Cornell in the fall of 1999. Derek holds a CPA designation in the US and holds a CA (Chartered Accountant) designation in Canada (later renamed Chartered Professional Accountant or Canadian CPA). 

His dissertation investigated whether an acquirer’s cash level has predictive power for post-acquisition returns (higher acquirer cash is associated with lower post-acquisition returns), and his dissertation was later published in Review of Accounting Studies in 2008. His early work continued investigating both cash level and acquisitions and expanded into other predictors of corporate performance. His more recent work examines earnings manipulation and examines the publication process for accounting researchers. 

Derek’s first academic position as an assistant professor after graduating was at Indiana University from 2004 to 2009, and he moved to Texas Tech University in the summer of 2009 to become a chaired Jerry S. Rawls associate professor. He was promoted to full in 2020.

Derek was awarded the SWAAA best paper award for 2020 for his working paper “Revisiting the Status of the Academic Discipline of Accounting” (later published in Issues in Accounting Education in 2021), and he received the Best Paper award in 2017 for his paper “How to Review a Paper” published in Issues in 2016. He was awarded an outstanding researcher award by the Rawls College of Business (Texas Tech) in 2014.

He is an avid cyclist who rode from Seattle to Boston on a road bike in the summer of 2014.