Jess (Berube) Filosa was awarded a William (Bill) Ezzell Scholarship in the amount of $10,000.  She was one of five recipients nationwide in 2022.  William (Bill) F. Ezzell, Jr. believed that the best way to encourage the next generation of CPAs was to put educators in the classroom with relevant and recent real-world experience. The AICPA Foundation created the William (Bill) Ezzell Scholarship to honor his passion and continue his legacy by providing financial assistance to CPAs pursuing their Ph.D. Jess, too, has a passion for being in the classroom and enjoyed leveraging her IT audit experience last spring while teaching accounting systems and controls.

Jess also received a 2023 Pamplin Doctoral Summer Research grant.  This grant is awarded to only a few PhD students in the college each year.  Jess' research project will examine the audit quality implications for companies that identify third-party risk as a potential threat to their organization. 

Jess joined the Ph.D. program in the Accounting and Information Systems department at Virginia Tech in the Fall of 2019. She received her B.S. in Business Administration from Bowling Green State University in 2015 and her M.S. in Accounting from the University of Virginia in 2016. She spent three years at EY in the IT audit practice in the Richmond, VA and Cleveland, OH offices where she supported ICFR audits and worked on SOC reports.

Jess focuses on audit archival research and is particularly interested in studying risk oversight, the regulatory environment, and technology. She is also working on a qualitative study examining how auditors experience digital transformation.