Academics
Offered in partnership by the UVA Darden School of Business and the McIntire School of Commerce, the M.S. in Business Analytics Program is designed to put working professionals at the intersection of business and analytics. The applied, project-based learning enables students to build their analytics and business skills within real-world scenarios and data and learn how to communicate insights.
Applied, project-based learning — often in teams
Technical business analytics & executive presentation skills
World-class faculty from Darden and McIntire
Meet the Faculty
Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan teaches three marketing courses at Darden. Focusing on analytics as it relates to marketing return on investment, customer lifetime value, mobile marketing, and the global political economy, his research has appeared in Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, and Harvard Business Review, among others. He is a co-author of Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. He serves as the Academic Director for the LaCross Institute for Ethical AI in Business at the Darden School of Business.
Many of his publications have earned prestigious awards (Don Lehmann Award for best dissertation-based article, MSI Alden G. Clayton award, ISBM Outstanding Dissertation Proposal Awards, ISBM award). He was recognized as a top 20 rising young scholar by the Marketing Science Institute and one of the top 40 professors under 40 by Poets & Quants, and among the top 5% of marketing strategy scholars by Journal of Marketing Education.
He has developed executive education programs or data analytics software for Capital One, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and other companies. For his work with IBM, he was a finalist for the INFORMS Practice Prize Competition.
Professor Li’s research interests relate to artificial intelligence and big data analytics, with applications in search engine, healthcare, marketing, platform and public policy. Her research has been published in MIS Quarterly; Information Systems Research; Journal of Marketing; Strategic Management Journal; Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of Management Information Systems; and ACM TOIS. She is a winner of the INFORMS Design Science Award, INFORMS CIST Best Paper Award, INFORMS Data Science Workshop Best Paper Award, WITS Best Paper Award, and WITS Best Prototype Award. Her research is also nominated as the finalist for Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award. Her research has been funded by NSF, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. She currently serves as an associate editor for MIS Quarterly.
Professor Li is currently teaching big data and business analytics courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive master levels. She was named a Poets&Quants Best Undergraduate Professor in 2023, received the Annual Faculty Recognition Award by The Order of Claw and Dagger at the University of Virginia in 2024, and previously received the Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012. Before joining the McIntire School, she was a Scientist at Microsoft, where she proposed and implemented several large-scale machine learning solutions for numerous Microsoft products such as Xbox One, Windows 8 Search Charm, Windows Phone App Store, Cortana, and Bing Entity Search. She is a member of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences).