Decision, Risk, and Operations Division

Santiago R. Balseiro is an Associate Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. He is the Research Director of the Deming Center and a part-time research scientist at Google Research. He teaches the core MBA classes Business Analytics and Operations Management, and the core Ph.D. class Foundations of Optimization.

Omar Besbes's primary research interests are in the area of data-driven decision-making with a focus on applications in e-commerce, pricing and revenue management, online advertising, operations management and general service systems. His research has been recognized by multiple prizes, including the 2019 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, the 2017 M&SOM society Young Scholar Prize, the 2013 M&SOM best paper award and the 2012 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section prize. He serves on the editorial boards of Management Science and Operations Research.

Professor Broadie currently teaches the elective courses Security Pricing: Models and Computation, Computational Finance, and Programming for Business Research. He is an Academic Advisory Board Member for the Program for Financial Studies. His research interests include the pricing of derivative securities, risk management and, more generally, quantitative methods for decision-making under uncertainty.

Andrew Cassidy is Director of Academic Administration in the Decision, Risk, and Operations (DRO) Division. He joined Columbia Business School in 2023 after working as Academic Administrator at Yeshiva University’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology. 

Professor Chan teaches the MBA core Operations Management course and the MBA electives, The US Healthcare System: Structures and Strategies; Healthcare Management, Design, and Strategy; and The Analytics Advantage. Her research is in the area of healthcare operations management. Her primary focus is in data-driven modeling of healthcare systems. Her research combines empirical and mathematical modeling to develop evidence-based approaches to improve patient flow.

Jing Dong is the DeRosa Family Associate Professor in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. Her primary research interests are in applied probability and stochastic simulation, with an emphasis on applications in service operations management. Her current research focuses on developing data-driven stochastic modeling to improve patient flow in hospitals.

Raymond G. Falci currently serves on several healthcare boards and is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, having previously worked on Wall Street for 20+ years. Mr. Falci was a Managing Director at Cain Brothers from 2006 to 2016, serving on the Executive Committee and co-heading the firm’s Services & Technology practice. Ray’s banking focus included Healthcare IT and Revenue Cycle Management as well as healthcare distribution, specialty pharmacy and PBMs. Prior to joining Cain Brothers, Mr.

Awi Federgruen is the Charles E. Exley Professor of Management and Chair of the Decision, Risk, and Operations (DRO) Division of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, where he served as Senior Vice Dean from 1997-2002. Professor Federgruen also served for many years as the Chair of the DRO Division, most recently from 2004-2010.

Professor Fraiman joined the faculty after a 17-year career at International Paper Company, where his most recent position was chief technology officer for eight manufacturing divisions. Prior to this he developed and managed a group responsible for productivity improvement and process innovation, and still earlier he directed company-wide educational activities. Fraiman teaches operations and technology management. His research explores institutionalizing quality improvement. He specializes in the retailing, consulting and process industries.

Professor Glasserman's research and teaching address risk management, quant finance, Monte Carlo simulation, statistics and operations. Prior to joining Columbia, Glasserman was with Bell Laboratories; he has also held visiting positions at Princeton University, NYU, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2011-2012, he was on leave from Columbia and working at the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department, where he continues to serve as a part-time consultant.

Linda Green is the Cain Brothers and Company Professor Emerita of Healthcare Management at Columbia Business School. She is also the Faculty Director of the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Management Program at the business school.

Mattan Griffel is a recipient of the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. Mattan is a two-time Y Combinator-backed entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Ophelia, a company that helps people quit opioids without having to go to rehab.

Daniel Guetta is Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on the ways companies can harness the power of data and analytics to drive value. He teaches classes in business analytics, including data science, pricing, supply chain management, and technical tools such as python and cloud computing. He has authored award-winning case studies in the area with a number of companies, and co-authored "Python for MBAs".

Sunny Israni brings nearly two decades of experience in technology and entrepreneurship. As CTO and Co-Founder of Lightswitch, he is building commerce technology to drive more innovative pricing and packaging capabilities for DTC subscription companies. Prior, Sunny founded three startups spanning across fintech and commerce. He has also spent several years in senior engineering roles at Bloomberg and Shopify. Sunny started his career on the fixed income trading floor at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, specializing in credit derivatives.

Hardeep Johar received an M.A. in Economics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science and is a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He received a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Stern School of Business, New York University in 1994. Prior to joining Columbia, Johar has worked as a quantitative trader at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, at a tech startup (MSpoke), and has taught at NYU Stern School of Business and the Gabelli School of Business Fordham University.

David Juran teaches courses in Managerial Statistics, Decision Models, and Applied Regression Analysis. He is a winner of the Robert W. Lear Service Award, the Margaret Chandler Memorial Award for Commitment to Excellence, and the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in a Core Course. His research on the modeling of human factors in productive systems and the management of quality has appeared in Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, and other journals.

Yash Kanoria is an Associate Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk and Operations division at Columbia Business School, working primarily on matching markets and the design and operations of marketplaces. Previously, he obtained a BTech from IIT Bombay in 2007, a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2012, and spent a year at Microsoft Research New England during 2012-13 as a Schramm postdoctoral fellow. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2017, a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship in 2015 and an INFORMS JFIG paper competition second prize in 2014. 

Professor Kolesar studies quality management and statistical quality control as well as applications of operations research and statistics, particularly in relation to the management of production and service systems. His recent research includes building models for the analysis and design of service systems with random cyclic customer demand patterns, accelerating the implementation and effectiveness of total quality management systems and optimizing credit-screening procedures.

Kriste Krstovski is an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Business School and an associate research scientist at the Data Science Institute. Previously he was a postdoctoral research scientist working with David Blei at Columbia University and John Lafferty at Yale University.

Hannah Li is an Assistant Professor in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on developing data science methods for social systems--marketplaces, education systems, and online platforms. Her research combines techniques from operations research, statistics, and economics to develop theoretical insights for practically motivated problems. She informs her work with industry experience, working for and collaborating with large online platforms.

Hongyao Ma is an Assistant Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at Columbia Business School. Her research is situated at the interface of computer science, economics and operations, with a particular focus on market design. Hongyao completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Harvard University in 2019, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Uber and then Caltech during 2019-2020. She obtained her M.S. in 2014 at Harvard, and B.E. in 2012 at Xi'an Jiaotong University, both in Electrical Engineering.

Will Ma is an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk, and Operations at Columbia Business School. During 2018-2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Google. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 from the MIT Operations Research Center, advised by David Simchi-Levi. His research is primarily focused on Revenue Management, building data-driven models to help e-tailers coordinate their product recommendation decisions with their supply chain constraints.

Costis Maglaras is the 16th Dean of Columbia Business School, and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business at Columbia University. Costis received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London, in 1990, and his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1991 and 1998, respectively. He joined Columbia Business School in 1998, when he joined the Decision, Risk and Operations Division.

Ezra Mehlman is a Managing Partner at Health Enterprise Partners L.P, a growth equity firm focused on healthcare IT and services. Ezra joined HEP in 2010, while completing his MBA at Columbia Business School. Prior to joining the team, Ezra was a Senior Analyst at the Advisory Board Company (NASDAQ: ABCO), providing best practice consulting and research services to hospitals and health systems. After leaving the Advisory Board Company, Ezra served as a Senior Consultant in the health care practice of Booz Allen Hamilton focusing on engagements in the provider space.

Ciamac C. Moallemi is the William von Mueffling Professor of Business in the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, where he has been since 2007. He also develops quantitative trading strategies at Bourbaki LLC, a quantitative investment advisor. A high school dropout, he received S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996).

Hongseok Namkoong is an Assistant Professor in the Decision, Risk, and Operations division at Columbia Business School. His research and teaching interests lie at the interface of operations research, machine learning, and statistics. In particular, his research develops reliable machine learning methods for decision-making problems.

Professor Picoult teaches the Risk Management course, which is currently offered in a joint Master of Science degree program of the DRO department of the Business School and the IEOR department of the School of Engineering and Science. In 2018 Picoult retired as managing director of Citi, where he had worked for 38 years. He had been the head of Citi’s Economic Capital and Stress Testing Methodology unit and served on a number of firm-wide risk governance committees.

Angela Quintero is an adjunct faculty and Managing Director of the W. Edwards Deming Center for Quality, Productivity, and Competitiveness. The center promotes operational excellence in business through the development of research, best practices, and strategic planning by sponsoring applied research, focused education and professional development initiatives, disseminating best practices, and fostering partnerships with companies in the area of operational excellence.

Nicola is an assistant professor in Decisions, Risk and Operations, working on industrial organization. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2021.

Dan joined the Decision, Risk, and Operations division of the Columbia Business School in Summer 2017. He teaches a core MBA course on statistics and a PhD course on dynamic optimization. His research lies at the intersection of statistical machine learning and online decision making, mostly falling under the broad umbrella of reinforcement learning. Outside academia, he works with Spotify to apply reinforcement learning style models to audio recommendations.

Professor Sexton’s research concerns successful global product and brand strategies and is based on both empirical work and his considerable experience with companies throughout the world. A recipient of the School’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Sexton has taught a wide variety of courses in the fields of marketing, international business and management science.

Professor Medini Singh joined Columbia Business School in 2001 as a member of the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division.   He teaches a variety of courses in Columbia’s MBA and Executive MBA programs, including the core course in Operations Management and electives in Supply Chain Management, Operations Strategy, and Service Operations Management.

Professor Stuart teaches Managerial Negotiations and Game-theoretic Business Strategy. His research focuses on the development of business theory using game-theoretic approaches. It includes the further development of "value-based strategy," which studies businesses as the central players in economic value creation, and “interactive decision theory,” which takes strategic uncertainty as the primary focus of strategic interaction.  Application of the research is principally to the fields of strategy, negotiation, and operations.

Dave Tamburri is a Managing Partner of Health Enterprise Partners, L.P. Prior to joining HEP in 2009, Dave was a Vice President for Susquehanna Growth Equity, a private equity group focused on growth stage technology companies. He was formerly the President and Chief Operating Officer of Onward Healthcare, Inc., a Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe portfolio company. Prior to Onward, Dave was an Executive Vice President of Pinnacor, Inc., a General Atlantic portfolio company, which went public.

Peter Tollman is Senior Partner Emeritus at Boston Consulting Group. He's also Senior Advisor to the firm and, previously, was Managing Director and Senior Partner in the firm's Boston office. He led BCG's CEO Advisory Practice globally, served as global leader of BCG’s Biopharmaceutical Practice, and led its People and Organization Practice in the Americas.  He was also a BCG Fellow, a prestigious thought-leadership post.

Garrett van Ryzin is the Paul M. Montrone Professor Emeritus of Decision, Risk, and Operations at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 2015, he joined Uber Technologies as Head of Marketplace Optimization Advanced Development. In 2017, he became Professor of Operations, Information and Technology Management at Cornell Tech.

Gustavo Vulcano's primary research interests are in data-driven decision-making with a focus on applications in pricing and revenue management, operations management and supply chain management. His research has been recognized by prizes such as the Best Paper Award 2021 of the INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship Section, and the 2017 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Award. He has served in the editorial board of the Operations Research journal.

Assaf Zeevi is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Operations Research, Statistics, and Machine Learning. In particular, he has been developing theory and algorithms for reinforcement learning, Bandit problems, stochastic optimization,  statistical learning and stochastic networks.