Columbia Business School has welcomed six new full-time faculty members in 2026, adding to the School's depth across finance, economics, operations, and management.

The new faculty bring expertise ranging from inflation and energy systems to public health and AI adoption. Several also come from industry and consulting, including Vanguard, KPMG, and Google X.

"Our newest full-time faculty members bring a myriad of experience across research and practice, including in foundational work in AI and in its application in platforms, marketplaces and public health, corporate finance, wealth management and investing, supply chain analytics, and macroeconomics,” said Dean Costis Maglaras, the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business. “Their expertise further bolsters Columbia Business School’s rigorous curriculum and research, and I look forward to seeing the impact they will have on our students in the coming years."

Professor Wajeeha Ahmad
Assistant Professor of Business, Management Division

Wajeeha Ahmad joins the School after earning her PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford University, where she is a digital fellow at the Digital Economy Lab. She studies how AI and digital technologies change businesses and society. She is especially interested in how firms and platforms adopt and govern these tools.

Ahmad earned a master's degree in technology and policy at MIT, where she was a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. She has worked at Microsoft, Google X, Keystone Strategy, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank.

"I'm excited to join CBS, where my research will focus on how to align business practices, particularly when it comes to designing and deploying AI tools, with societal interests. The Management division is a particularly attractive place to do this work because it allows me to investigate theoretically meaningful and empirically relevant phenomena with methodological rigor,” Ahmad says. “I'm excited to meet with students and colleagues from across the School and contribute to this vibrant intellectual atmosphere."

Professor Paulo Costa
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Finance Division

Paulo Costa is a behavioral economist who studies and teaches wealth management, investing, and personal finance. He spent six years at Vanguard leading behavioral economics and wealth management research projects, which the firm turned into investment and financial planning tools that millions of clients now use. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Professor Costa gives more than 30 keynote addresses a year to family offices, financial advisors, and investors. His research has appeared in The Journal of Wealth Management, and his research has been cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

“Wealth management sits at the intersection of finance and people. I’m excited to help CBS students learn not only how to make better financial decisions themselves, but also how to become the next generation of professionals helping families navigate some of the most consequential financial decisions of their lives,” Costa says.

Professor Sorin Maruster
Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Finance Division

Sorin Maruster studies transfer pricing, corporate finance, and mechanism design. His research looks at how tax rules shape where multinational firms produce and how they organize themselves.

Maruster has also worked on these problems as a practitioner, advising companies, investors, and governments as a consultant at Alvarez & Marsal. Previously, Maruster worked in economic and valuation services at KPMG, pricing difficult-to-value instruments such as earnouts, convertible bonds, and equity-based compensation. He earned his PhD in economics from Northwestern University.

Professor Mark D. Rodgers
Senior Lecturer in Discipline, Decision, Risk, and Operations Division

Mark D. Rodgers joins the full-time faculty after a career in academia, government, and industry. He works on energy systems, supply chain analytics, and data-driven decision-making, using mathematical models to help organizations plan decades ahead. His research and applied work sit at the intersection of operations, analytics, energy, and sustainability, with a particular focus on using quantitative models to help organizations and policymakers make better decisions about complex systems. Increasingly, he is interested in translating these tools into decisions that have measurable impact in industry and public policy.

His optimization tools have guided more than $20 billion in long-term infrastructure planning, and policy leaders have used them to shape New Jersey's clean-energy and public-health strategies. As principal investigator, he has secured more than $1.5 million in external research funding.

Before CBS, Rodgers was an assistant professor of supply chain management at Rutgers Business School and a consultant and executive advisor to organizations including Verizon and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He holds a PhD in industrial and systems engineering from Rutgers University.

“What drew me to Columbia Business School is the opportunity to connect rigorous analytical thinking with consequential real-world problems. Some of the most interesting challenges facing businesses today, from AI-driven energy demand and infrastructure investment to supply chain resilience and sustainability, do not fit neatly within a single discipline,” Rogers says. “CBS is an extraordinary environment for bringing together operations, business, technology, and policy to tackle those problems at scale.”

Professor Roshni Sahoo
Assistant Professor of Business, Decision, Risk, and Operations Division

Roshni Sahoo works on data-driven decision-making for social impact. She builds statistical methods for problems in public health and economic development, drawing on machine learning, optimization, and causal inference.

Sahoo completed her PhD in computer science at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in research journals such as Operations Research, at machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS and ICLR, and has been covered in The Economist and Vox. 

Professor Kunal Sangani
Assistant Professor of Business, Economics Division

Kunal Sangani is a macroeconomist who studies inflation, aggregate productivity, and firm behavior. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies.

He comes to CBS from Northwestern University's Department of Economics, where he was an assistant professor. Sangani earned his PhD in business economics from Harvard University, winning the Padma Desai Prize for graduate student research, then spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University. Before graduate school, he worked at Boston Consulting Group and at a payments startup in San Francisco.