Brian Akins is an associate professor of accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, and teaches financial accounting in the full time and professional MBA programs and the Ph.D. program. His research focuses on financial reporting quality and the impact of accounting in debt and equity market settings. Dr. Akins earned his Ph.D. in accounting from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 after defending his dissertation studying the relationship between reporting quality and uncertainty about credit risk, captured by disagreement between the rating agencies.

He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds master’s degrees in business administration from Rice University and in biblical interpretation from Lubbock Christian University.