Meet Your Faculty

As a UC Davis Master of Science in Business Analytics student, you’ll learn from world-renowned professors who are both academic experts and leading industry practitioners that are actively working across numerous segments of the big data industry. Additionally, our 10-to-1 student-professor ratio can ensure your professors will know you by name and serve as mentors during your education and after you graduate.

Glossary
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Mak Ahmad

Mak Ahmad

Lecturer

Ph.D., Computer Science, UC Davis, In Progress
Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Science, Sonoma State University, 2017
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer and Electrical Engineering, UC Davis, 2004

Research Expertise
Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction

Areas of Expertise
Technology Management

Carrie Beam

Carrie Beam

Academic Director, MSBA Program

Ph.D. in Operations Research, University of California at Berkeley

Carrie Beam brings 20 years of experience in analytics consulting, research and classroom teaching to the program. Her expertise includes data management and visualization, predictive and prescriptive analytics models, and communication of complex analytics materials to general business stakeholders.

Greta Hsu

Greta Hsu

Professor

Ph.D., Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Greta Hsu is Professor of Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, M.S. in Statistics, and M.A. and B.A. Sociology from Stanford University. 

Through her research, Hsu develops understanding of how market categories are socially constructed, how they are used and strategically manipulated by market actors, and how they shape market evolution and competitive dynamics. Her work includes studies of industry dynamics in the cannabis, e-cigarette, wine, film, book publishing, global fashion, and high-tech industries. She has published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, American Sociological Review, and the British Medical Journal.

Hsu is an associate editor at Administrative Science Quarterly and co-editor of Research in Organizational Behavior. She was formerly a department editor and associate editor at Management Science, senior editor at Organization Science, and co-editor of the Culture and Economic Life book series at Stanford University Press.

Courses Taught 
The Individual & Group dynamics, Managing People in High-Performance Organizations, Strategy and Structure, People Analytics

Fast Facts

  • Expert in market categorization processes, organizational identity, and industry evolutionary dynamics

Awards

  • One of the Top Three Best Paper Awards for "The Impact of Mandated Pay Gap Transparency on Firms’ Reputations as Employers,” 2022, Saïd School of Business, Oxford University Center for Corporate Reputation's Annual Symposium, 2024
  • Seeman Faculty Term Fellowship, UC Davis, 2011.
  • Invited Speaker, Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management, 2011.
  • Invited Speaker, The 13th Organizational Ecology Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 2010.
  • Research Grant, National Science Foundation, Co-Primary Investigator on “SoD-TEAM: Longitudinal effects of design in open source projects,” ($750,000), 2006-09.
  • Industry Studies Program Travel Grant, Sloan Foundation, (with S. Grodal), 2008.
  • Small Grant in Aid of Research, UC Davis.

540 Alumni Lane 3414 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Headshot of Pantelis Loupos

Pantelis Loupos

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Research Expertise 
Social Customer Relationship Management, Digital Platforms, Business Analytics 

Pantelis Loupos' research interests focus on understanding consumer behavior in digital platforms and in particular networked services. In particular, services whose value is a function of the number of customers they have and their underlying network topology.

(530) 752-7662

540 Alumni Lane 3214 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Headshot of Ashwin Aravindakshan

Ashwin Aravindakshan Nair

Associate Professor

Associate Professor Ashwin Aravindakshan’s research interests center on learning how brands can better allocate their advertising resources (e.g., budgets, creatives, etc.) across different regions and/or multiple media over time. In addition to studying such dynamic advertising models, his research also investigates the dynamics of customer behavior and loyalty to help managers devise better communication and targeting policies in order to optimize their marketing mix at the individual level.

(530) 752-5767

540 Alumni Lane 3312 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Headshot of Guru Pundoor

Guru Pundoor

Lecturer

Ph.D., Management Science, R.H. Smith School of Business (2005), University of Maryland, College Park
Master of Science (M.S.), Systems Engineering, Institute for Systems Research (2002), University of Maryland, College Park
Bachelor of Technology, Mechanical Engineering (2000), Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India

Headshot of Olivier Rubel

Olivier Rubel

Professor

Professor Olivier Rubel is fascinated by two related questions: How can firms make better decisions in highly competitive environments? And what are the optimal strategies for implementing these decisions over time?

Rubel’s research examines how companies can best determine and allocate resources to marketing activities when facing a realistic chance of encountering a product harm crisis such as the SUV rollover controversy faced by Ford and Firestone in 2000 or the many product recalls Mattel was forced to make in 2007. His findings point to no single, simple answer to invest less or invest more. Rather, each firm’s best solution depends on the characteristics of the crisis, including its likelihood, its impacts on sales and on the effectiveness of marketing instruments.

(530) 752-3739

540 Alumni Lane 3310 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616

Professor Chih-Ling portrait photo

Chih-Ling Tsai

Distinguished Professor of Management (Emeritus)

Ph.D., University of Minnesota

Research Expertise 
Regression analysis, model selection, high-dimensional data, time series, biostatistics, application of statistics in business.

Teaching Field 
Statistics

Professor Chih-Ling Tsai is a recognized expert in the practical application of statistics in business, including regression analysis, model selection, high-dimensional data, time series and biostatistics. He has had more than 100 research papers published in academic journals relating to statistics, marketing, finance and biostatistics. He teaches courses on forecasting and managerial research methods, and time series analysis and forecasting.

Tsai earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Minnesota and an Master of Science (M.S.) in mathematics from the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. He earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics from Tamkang University.

Awards

Catherine Yang

Catherine Yang

Professor

Ph.D. Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2004
Master of Arts (M.A.), Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2001
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Management Information Systems, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, 1998

Research Expertise
Business analytics, big data analytics, predictive modeling, artificial intelligence and machine learning

Professor Yinghui (Catherine) Yang focuses her research on business intelligence, big data, machine learning, data mining methods for business applications, online shopping patterns analysis, user profiling, etc. Her research has been published in top-tier journals in Information Systems, Marketing and Computer Science, including Information Systems Research, Marketing Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

(530) 754-5967

540 Alumni Lane 3418 Gallagher Hall Davis, CA 95616