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 Du specializes in strategic, organizational, and intercultural communication. He holds a Ph.D. in Strategic Communication from George Mason University and an M.A. in Interpersonal and Organizational Communication from Liberty University. With over 10 years of college teaching experience, Professor Du adopts an interdisciplinary approach to foster a supportive and engaging learning environment, emphasizing ethical and effective communication tailored to audience, purpose, and context.

Prior to joining McIntire, Professor Du taught at Baylor University and Fort Hays State University, where he developed and taught various business and organizational communication courses. His research focuses on promoting inclusive organizational identity and intercultural competence, with publications in various academic journals and presentations at national conferences. Professor Du is dedicated to preparing students to excel in a globalized world through innovative teaching methods and practical, real-world applications.

Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s research and teaching activities focus on data science, forecasting, project management, and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences. Professor Grushka-Cockayne is an award-winning teacher, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award (2011), UVA’s Mead-Colley Award (2012), the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award (2013, 2022), and Faculty Diversity Award (2013, 2018). In 2015, she won a UVA All-University Teaching Award. She has served as the leader of the open enrollment courses “Project Management for Executives” and “The Women’s Leadership Program.”

Before starting her academic career, she worked as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company and has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. She is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS, the Decision Analysis Society, the Operational Research Society, and the Project Management Institute. She is an associate editor at Management Science and Operation Research and President-elect of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society.

In 2014, Professor Grushka-Cockayne was named one of “21 Thought-Leader Professors” in Data Science. Her “Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management” Coursera MOOC had over 100,000 enrolled. Her “Data Science for Business” Harvard Online course has taught hundreds of learners around the world.

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.

Dr. Ray Charles “Chuck” Howard’s research on heuristics and biases seeks to advance our understanding of when and why we make suboptimal decisions, and how our decision-making can be improved. As an example, his research on financial decision-making answers questions like: Why do we underpredict future expenses and overpredict future income? How can we make more accurate financial predictions? How can we stay on budget and avoid overspending?

Dr. Howard’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Service Research, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. He has received awards from the Society for Consumer Psychology, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Behavioral Insights Group at Harvard University. Dr. Howard’s research findings have reached a global audience, including executives, policymakers, and academics in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and his commentary has been featured by CNN, NPR Marketplace, The Conversation, The Brainy Business Podcast, The Morning Beat Podcast, Wallethub, Money Geek, and KBTX News.

Ben Leiner (Darden ’19) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Darden teaching a second-year elective, “Technology and Ethics.” His interests lie at the intersection of technology and democracy, specifically how technology helps and hinders civic participation and individual well-being. Off Grounds, he leads product marketing and consumer insights at SmartNews, a news aggregation platform with over 20 million readers worldwide. He also publishes a Substack newsletter, “The Ethical Technologist,” and hosts a podcast by the same name.

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.

Professor 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.

Professor 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. Professor Palomba also maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to online lessons.

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 Science, Operations 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.