Dr. Van Alfen joined the Finance Department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale as an Assistant Professor in 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Kentucky and his M.S. and B.S. in Financial Economics from Utah State University.

His areas of research include financial advisors, reputation, misconduct, and product markets. This research has been presented at conferences such as Western Finance Association, European Finance Association, Financial Intermediation Research Society, and Midwest Finance Association, to name a few.

He has experience teaching corporate finance, security valuation, investments, microeconomics, and econometrics to both undergraduate and graduate students. He passed level one of the CFA exam and seeks to incorporate the CFA material into his curriculum. He also frequently incorporates Python programming applications in his courses.