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 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).
Assistant Professor Michael Albert teaches Quantitative Analysis courses in Darden’s MBA program, and he has joint appointments in Systems Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at UVA. He also serves as the faculty liaison for the MSBA program. His research focuses on combining machine learning and algorithmic techniques to automate the design of markets. His work has appeared in leading artificial intelligence and machine learning venues such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
Prior to joining Darden in 2018, Albert received his Ph.D. in financial economics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He has also worked as a visiting assistant professor of finance at the Ohio State University, as a postdoctoral researcher at the Learning Agents Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin under Peter Stone, and as a postdoctoral researcher in the artificial intelligence group headed by Vincent Conitzer at Duke University.