Faculty

The Master of Science in Business Analytics Program is taught by top professors from both the Darden School of Business and McIntire School of Commerce. Explore their profiles to learn more about our faculty and their areas of expertise. Please note, faculty vary each academic year and term and are subject to change.

Meet our faculty for the 2023-2024 academic year

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. 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.

Professor Chao teaches operations management, innovation, and new product development courses at the Darden School of Business. His research and teaching is focused on helping managers design more innovative organizations. He has helped many entrepreneurial ventures and established companies manage their innovation and new product development processes, and currently serves as an adviser or board member for numerous early-stage ventures. He is a leader in novel curriculum design, having developed a number of cross-disciplinary experiential courses at the University focused on product development and technology commercialization.

Much of Professor Chao’s research and teaching is based on fieldwork and case studies conducted at companies such as 3M, Microsoft, Whirlpool, and Lockheed Martin, among others. Research projects include work on entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation and design contests, and R&D portfolio management. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Production and Operations Management, Operations Research, and Management Science.

Professor Alex Cowan teaches three courses at Darden in the area of design and digital innovation: Software Design, Software Development, and Applied Innovation (in Silicon Valley). With Darden, he also created the Coursera specialization Agile Development, one of the top 15 specializations on Coursera. His Venture Design framework is widely used by practitioners and instructors as a systematic approach to developing new products and businesses.

He has delivered workshops to student and professional audiences at such venues as General Assembly, The Lean Startup Circle, Startup Weekend, SVPMA, Swissnex, UCSC, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the UVA iLab, and Stanford’s d.school. He currently serves on four corporate boards and as an adviser to multiple startups and “intrapreneurial” ventures.

Prior to Darden, Cowan was an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. His most recent ventures are Brand Lattice, a brand strategy platform, and Leonid Systems, an enterprise software vendor in the cloud communications space.

Professor Gray conducts research that helps managers improve their company’s performance through a better understanding of the dynamic interactions between people, technologies, and competitive strategies. His research also uncovers the underlying mechanisms by which social media and other technologies impact individuals, communities, and society. His specific areas of expertise and research include:

  • How organizational networks of collaboration improve performance and enhance innovation
  • Collaborative impacts of social media that empower employees to interact in valuable new ways
  • Strategic use of information technology to change how companies compete
  • How the use of different technologies impacts important issues in society, such as political polarization

Professor Gray is a senior editor at MIS Quarterly and is a regular presenter at various national and international conferences. His award-winning research has been published in many leading academic and managerial outlets.

Professor Grazioli is the Director of the M.S. in MIT Program, which has a mission to develop managers who deliver greater business value through information technology. Program participants are seasoned professionals, with an average work experience of 13 years. The program has been in existence for over 20 years, and Professor Grazioli has directed it for the last decade. Dozens of his students have achieved C-level positions in business and nonprofit organizations.

Professor Grazioli has taught MIT, digital innovation, enterprise architecture, databases, financial engineering, and business process modeling to undergraduate, graduate, and executive education classes in the United States, Europe, and South America. His contributions as an educator have been recognized with the UVA All-University Teaching award (2009), the 12th annual Faculty Award from UVA’s Order of Claw and Dagger (2018), and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022).

Young Hou is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy, Ethics and Entrepreneurship area at Darden, where he teaches core Strategy and Corporate Strategy in the full-time MBA program and Strategy and Analytics in the M.S. in Business Analytics program.

His research focuses on the dynamic interplay between firm positioning and firm resources in market and nonmarket settings. In particular, he examines how firms reposition themselves to enhance their competitiveness and increase the value of their resources. His work employs computationally scalable machine learning techniques to analyze high-dimensional data, neural networks, experiments, and interviews.

Young Hou graduated from Harvard Business School with a Ph.D. in Business Administration in Strategy. He received his Master of Arts in Statistics from Harvard University, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Engineering from Dartmouth College, graduating magna cum laude with high honors. Prior to joining academia, he worked as a fixed income derivatives trader with PnL responsibilities at Fidelity Investments in Boston.

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 QuarterlyInformation Systems ResearchJournal of MarketingStrategic 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 received a teaching award for her Business Intelligence course at Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 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).

Professor Maurer has extensive experience in various cybersecurity-related fields, including risk management, vulnerability assessment, security awareness and training, business continuity planning, and IT governance. He also has both research and teaching interests in data management, IT alignment, and IT strategy. His research has appeared in MIS Quarterly; European Journal of Information Systems; and MIS Quarterly Executive and has been presented at leading international IS conferences. He is also a member of the Society of Information Management IT Trends Study research team.

Prior to earning his Ph.D., Professor Maurer worked for KPMG as an IT Auditor and as the Director of Security and Controls for TRX Inc. In these roles, he developed practical skills relating to the effective and safe use of IT in organizations. He is passionate about applying his professional experience to his teaching to best prepare students for their future careers.

Professor James Maxham teaches Customer Analytics & Brand Strategy and global immersion courses exploring business, economics, and culture in China and Southeast Asia. His research examines quantitative consumer models that help marketing scholars and retail managers better understand customer loyalty trends. Recent work investigates how human resource management practices, service policies, product return policies, retail concept extensions, and loyalty card programs influence customer attitudes, shopping behaviors, and store performance.

Maxham is a member of the American Statistical Association, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and American Marketing Association. His research has appeared in Marketing Science; Journal of Marketing; Journal of Marketing Research; Journal of Applied Psychology; and Journal of Retailing, among others. He has served on the editorial review board of Journal of Marketing, and serves on the editorial review boards of Journal of Retailing and Journal of Service Research.

He was previously employed by the NCR Corporation and Russell Stover Candies.

Professor Mousavi has expertise in data science and business analytics. His research topics are related to the societal impacts and economics of social media, data science and business analytics, user-generated content, and healthcare information systems. He uses machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP), along with econometrics, to identify quasi experimental settings and study the underlying relationships among the constructs of interest. Professor Mousavi’s work has appeared in Information Systems Research and Journal of Management Information Systems.

Professor Mousavi has taught advanced data science and business analytics, research methods, computer programming, and project management at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate levels.

Professor Rick Netemeyer is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor of Free Enterprise at the McIntire School of Commerce. Netemeyer’s substantive research interests include consumer and organizational behavior, public policy and social issues, health/maladaptive behaviors, and customer attitudes and beliefs as they relate to a firm’s financial outcomes. He is currently researching topics relating to financial literacy and smoking cessation. His methodological expertise includes structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, measurement and psychometrics, and survey research methodologies.

Netemeyer’s research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Marketing Research; Journal of Marketing; Journal of Applied Psychology; OBHDP; Marketing Science; American Journal of Public Health; American Journal of Psychiatry; and others. He is a co-author of two textbooks pertaining to measurement and psychometrics, and is a member of the editorial review boards of Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Marketing; and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.

Visiting Assistant Professor Anthony Palomba teaches leadership communication and data visualization in Darden’s MBA program and management communication in the MSBA program. His teaching interests focus on how business professionals can present data results and actionable insights to key stakeholders through storytelling.

Palomba’s research explores entertainment consumption and strives to understand how consumer behavior models can be built to predict consumption patterns. He also studies how technology innovations influence competition among entertainment and media firms. His research has been published in numerous academic journals, including Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services; Journal of Media Business Studies; Entertainment Computing; and Games & Culture.

During his doctoral studies, he worked with Nielsen, researching how millennials consume and use entertainment and media content, products, and services. His first position after earning his Ph.D. was as a research manager at Ipsos, where he conducted market research for HBO, Facebook, Fox Sports 1, CNN, and Sesame Street, among others. He has also independently collaborated with Bravo, WPLR 99.1, and WWE, among other firms.

He previously taught at CUNY and St. John’s University. Palomba also maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to online lessons.

Associate Professor Bidhan (“Bobby”) Parmar teaches first-year ethics and a second-year elective on collaboration at the Darden School of Business. He was recently named one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 in the world.

Parmar’s research interests focus on how managers make decisions and collaborate in uncertain and changing environments to create value for stakeholders. His work helps executives better handle ambiguity in their decision making. Parmar’s work has been published in Organization Science; Psychological Science; Journal of Applied Psychology; Organization Studies; Business & Society; and Journal of Business Ethics.

Parmar is a fellow at the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, Darden Experiential Leadership Development Lab, and Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to teaching at Darden, Parmar taught at the McIntire School of Commerce.

 

Dana Popescu is an associate professor at the University of Virginia Darden Business School, where she teaches in the full-time MBA program. Prior to joining Darden in 2017, Dana was a faculty member at INSEAD. She has taught in undergraduate, graduate and executive programs in Asia, Europe and the U.S.

Popescu’s main research interests include pricing optimization, revenue management and demand forecasting. In the past, she worked on projects related to ad scheduling and revenue optimization for television networks in the U.S. and Singapore. Her most recent work focuses on how advances in automation and information technology are changing the way pricing decisions are made, in real time, based on the latest information on demand, inventory and competitors’ prices. Another recent area of work involves aggregation of subjective opinions for demand forecasting. Her research has been published in top journals such as Management ScienceOperations Research and Naval Research Logistics.

Popescu has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management, was a secretary/treasurer for the INFORMS Revenue and Pricing Management Section, and is currently a board member in the INFORMS Revenue and Pricing Management Section.

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.

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.