Conference Speakers

Alex Arnon is Associate Director of Policy Analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, where he specializes in tax policy and macroeconomics. He developed PWBM’s corporate income tax microsimulation model, which is used to project the budgetary and economic effects of corporate and international taxes. He also contributes to PWBM’s economic projections, as well as tracking and analysis of current economic conditions. Before joining PWBM, Alex worked as an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office.

Phil Bangayan is a Principal Data Scientist at Teradata, where he has worked since 2018. In this role, his industry focus is on the Media & Entertainment, Travel and Hospitality industries, drawing upon his fifteen years of experience in theme parks and resorts. Having worked in data science, finance and marketing roles, Phil’s functional passion is applying analytics to solve business problems, thereby growing revenue and reducing cost. As an experienced speaker, Phil has presented at Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, moderated panels at UCLA, and co-authored twelve publications. Prior to working at Teradata, Phil held leadership roles at The Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.​

Professor Eric T. Bradlow is the Vice Dean of Analytics, the K.P. Chao Professor, Professor of Marketing, Statistics, Economics and Education, chair of  Wharton’s Marketing Department, and the co-founder of AI and Analytics for Business.

An applied statistician, Professor Bradlow uses high-powered statistical models to solve problems on everything from Internet search engines to product assortment issues. Specifically, his research interests include Bayesian modeling, statistical computing, and developing new methodology for unique data structures with application to business problems.

Eric has been named a fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Educational Research Association, is past chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Marketing, is a statistical fellow of Bell Labs, and was named DuPont Corporation’s best young researcher while working there in 1992.

A prolific scholar, Professor Bradlow’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Psychometrika, Statistica Sinica, Chance, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Journal of Marketing Research.

Professor Bradlow has won numerous teaching awards at Wharton, including the Anvil Award for best teacher, MBA Core Curriculum teaching award, the Miller-Sherrerd MBA Core Teaching award and the Excellence in Teaching Award.   Professor Bradlow earned his PhD and Master’s degrees in Mathematical Statistics from Harvard University and his BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Stephanie J. Creary is an identity and diversity scholar and a field researcher. She is also a founding faculty member of the Wharton IDEAS lab (Identity, Diversity, Engagement, Affect, and Social Relationships), an affiliated faculty member of Wharton People Analytics, a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), and affiliated faculty member of the Penn Center for Africana Studies. She leads the Leading Diversity@Wharton Speaker Series as part of her Leading Diversity in Organizations course at Wharton and hosts the Knowledge@Wharton Leading Diversity at Work Podcast Series.

As an organizational scholar, Professor Creary studies people’s identities at work, including their professional identities, marginalized identities, and the resources their organizations provide to support their identities. Specifically, her work investigates how individuals effectively navigate identity-related tensions and boundaries at work particularly when personal values and workplace norms related to inclusion and exclusion may seem at odds. She examines the micro- and organizational roots of the issues, workplace practices that seek to address the issues, and consequences of actions taken. She has studied these dynamics in a variety of organizations, including global firms, corporate board rooms, hospitals, yoga communities, and the US Army.

Prior to joining the Wharton faculty, Professor Creary was on the faculty of Cornell University. Prior to completing her PhD degree, she was a research associate at Harvard Business School and The Conference Board in NYC researching corporate diversity and inclusion practices. She also has extensive work experience in the health care industry. Professor Creary has earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Boston University Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences; an MBA degree from Simmons School of Management; and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Liza Duffy is a Teradata Customer Success Manager based in Derry, New Hampshire. Liza has over 20 years of analytic experience, including research, business intelligence and machine learning. Liza received her Bachelors in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross in 1995 and an MBA in International Business from Southern New Hampshire University in 2012.

Her early career included adolescent sleep research at Brown University and various analytic roles at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Autodesk and Harvard University. In 2012, she joined Teradata as an analytical consultant in Stockholm, Sweden. While abroad, Liza led both pre-sale and post-sale efforts with clients like Volvo, Kone, Siemens and Nokia.

Back in the US, Liza led Teradata’s Data Science Delivery team while working with clients across industries. She is currently a Customer Success Manager, ensuring Teradata’s customers benefit from their investments through training, demos and workshops.

Zhijun Guo is the data scientist, data engineer, and marketing comm manager at Microsoft. Over the past 6+ years at the marketing department at Microsoft, Zhijun helped the team build the infrastructures of data and analytics from scratch, drive cloud innovation, and built the blocks for AI and machine learning. He is leading the data engineering team by providing the end to end solutions for business decisions, Azure platform transformation, security compliance, and internal utility tools. As a data scientist, he focuses on analyzing business problems and seeking cutting-edge ways to deal with real problems. He has rich experiences in big data platforms, graph databases, AI/machine learning, and Azure Synapse.

Professor Raghu Iyengar’s research interests fall in two domains: pricing and social influence. In the area of pricing, his work focuses on the impact of multi-part pricing schemes on consumer response. The success of such pricing mechanisms to extract consumer surplus depends on how consumers respond to different components. Methodologically, Iyengar has developed novel consumer demand models that capture the effect of multi-part pricing tariffs in a theoretically meaningful way and include contextual factors such as consumers’ uncertainty about usage. Substantively, he has shown that accounting for consumers’ uncertainty is important for firm profits especially when multi-part prices are employed. In the area of social networks, Iyengar has done work that has investigated how and why such influence may be at work. Across several studies, Iyengar has identified the underlying mechanism(s) such as awareness, social learning or social normative pressure that may be at work in different contexts. Understanding the mechanism(s) is important not only theoretically but also managerially, because which customers to target and which ties to activate using what message depends on what mechanism is at work.

Professor Iyengar’s other current research projects focus on the impact of referral coupons on consumer behavior and how changes in loyalty program requirements may change future customer behavior. His research has been published or forthcoming in Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Psychometrika, Quantitative and Marketing Economics and Experimental Economics. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Professor Iyengar’s teaching interests are in the area of Marketing Research and Analytics. He earned his PhD and MPhil from Columbia University and his B. Tech. from IIT Kanpur, India.

Trained as an organizational psychologist, Dean Erika James is an award-winning educator and leading expert on crisis leadership, workplace diversity, and management strategy. In addition to being the first woman and first person of color to be appointed dean in Wharton’s 139-year history, Dean James has paved the way for women in leadership both in education and corporate America throughout her career.

Prior to Wharton, she was the John H. Harland Dean at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School from 2014 to 2020, where she sparked a culture of collaboration and led a redesign of the undergraduate business curriculum. She has been instrumental in developing groundbreaking executive education programs, including the Women’s Leadership program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School.

Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson is the executive director and senior fellow of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. She received her PhD in Neural Science at New York University. Her research focuses on vision and visual behavior. Her work spans physiological approaches in the retina and early visual cortex to using eye tracking to investigate how human observers look and navigate through the world, how these processes unfold over time and with experience, and the role of social cognition and decision making in these processes. She co-instructs Visual Marketing with Professor Barbara Kahn at the Wharton School.

Professor Katherine Klein is the Edward H. Bowman Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to coming to Wharton, Katherine was on the faculty of the University of Maryland and a visiting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

An award-winning organizational psychologist, Katherine has conducted extensive field research regarding a range of topics including team leadership, climate, conflict, social networks and effectiveness; organizational change and technology implementation; employee diversity; and employee responses to stock ownership and stock options. She has taught executive education, studied, and consulted with a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations including Charles Schwab, Rohm and Haas, North American Scientific, Medtronic, The Baltimore Shock Trauma Center, Penn Vet, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Korean Management Association.

Her research has been published in numerous top journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, the Academy of Management Journal, and the Academy of Management Review. A former associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology, she is currently an associate editor of Administrative Science Quarterly. Katherine is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.

Katherine’s current research interests include race in organizations; leadership succession and social network change; and Rwanda’s reconciliation and reconstruction following the 1994 genocide.

Dean Knox is an assistant professor in Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He develops quantitative models and methods for complex and unstructured social science data. His applied work ranges from policing to political communication.

Dean’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in Science, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Political Science Review. It has received the Gosnell Prize for excellence in political methodology, the John T. Williams dissertation prize, and the best poster award by the Society for Political Methodology.

Dean is a faculty fellow at Analytics at Wharton and an affiliate of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. Please visit policingresearch.org for work by his group, Research on Policing Reform and Accountability.

Alex is in his final year as a Ph.D. student at the Wharton School’s Department of Operations, Information, & Decisions. Prior to joining Wharton, he studied mathematics and held technical positions in digital marketing, data science, and consulting. Alex’s academic research focuses on the applications of A/B testing and machine learning in e-commerce and online retail. After graduating this summer, he will be joining the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Marketing.

Daryl Morey is entering his first season as President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. Morey oversees all areas of the 76ers basketball operations department. Morey joins the organization after 14 seasons with the Houston Rockets, 13 of which were spent as general manager.

With Morey as general manager, Houston compiled a 640- 400 (.615) record, the second-best of any NBA team during that span. Among executives with at least 1,000 games of experience, Morey’s record stands as the fifth-best in league history; a top-five that also includes the likes of R.C. Buford and Jerry West. Between 2007-20, Morey’s teams never had a losing season, winning 50-plus games eight times and qualifying for the postseason on 10 occasions. The Rockets’ eight straight playoff appearances, including multiple trips to the Western Conference Finals, represent the longest streak in the NBA.

Over the years, Morey played a part in bringing several All-Star-caliber players to Houston through trades and free agency, including James Harden, Kyle Lowry, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook. In 2017-18, Morey earned Executive of the Year honors, while Harden was named MVP, following a franchise best 65-17 regular season.

Prior to joining the Rockets as assistant general manager in 2006, Morey served three years as Sr. Vice President of Operations for the Boston Celtics. Originally from Ohio, Morey is a graduate of Northwestern University and also holds an MBA from MIT where he serves as the co-chair of the school’s annual Sports Analytics Conference.

I am a marketing and technology leader for B2B Cloud and SaaS applications with expertise in transforming enterprise organizations with AI analytics, demand creation, integrated marketing, operations, and product development.

Expertise in building integrated marketing campaigns, using applied AI to influence revenue, and launching enterprise products at scale, I currently lead Demand creation, data science, marketing operations, and technology teams for Microsoft 54B+ US commercial business.

I had the opportunity to lead marketing technology and operations during Microsoft digital transformation in creating the global demand center (GDC) and integrating marketing technologies to the best in the industry. Also, I built the marketing data science and operations teams from ground-up.

Driving the agenda to build combined sales and marketing journeys using data science, I am a data driven leader in using AI and machine learning techniques for growing revenue, creating demand, and building personalized marketing journeys to predict best next actions and target accounts.

Prior to Marketing and Data Science, I am services and technology leader – Managed Microsoft Research Health analytics strategy and implementations, and business strategies for large heath systems and States as management consultant at ECG; Also Led large technology teams and architected, developed, and delivered several electronic medical records and back office systems.

Specialties – Building large and diverse Marketing, Data Science and Services teams, Applied AI analytics, Demand generation, Technology, Marketing and Field operations

Richard Prisinzano is the Director of Policy Analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model. He came PWBM after 13 years in the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of Treasury. While at OTA, Richard worked on the taxation of pass-through entities and small businesses and coauthored Treasury Reports on the owners of pass-through businesses and helped develop Treasury’s methodology for identifying small businesses from tax return data. He has also published papers on gasoline taxes, tax migration of millionaires, and major league baseball managers. He currently sits on the IRS Statistics of Income Advisory Panel and serves as an advisor to the Bureau of Economic Analysis on Small Business issues. He has taught econometrics and sports economics at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University. He holds a B.S. in Economics and Political Science from James Madison University, an M.A. in Economics from Miami University, and a Ph.D. and M.S. in Economics from the University of Texas.

As the Executive Director of AI and Analytics for Business, Mary Purk leads the academic research center that focuses on the development and application of cutting-edge analytics methods. Through AIAB’s experiential programs, Ms. Purk connects students, academics, and professionals across multiple industries to solve complex, real-world business challenges using machine learning, AI, and big data.

Ms. Purk has held other principal roles at Nielsen and IRI developing and implementing enterprise-wide analytic platforms focused on customers and brand equity. Her expertise includes forecast models, consumer segmentations, marketing mix models, product assortments, pricing, and digital strategies.

Other work experience includes leading the Retail Research Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and consulting roles with Accenture and AT Kearney.

Ms. Purk is a proud MBA alumnus of the University of Chicago Booth and the University of Illinois. Ms. Purk has designed and instructed executive education courses, presented at numerous conferences, and published papers in the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Retailing.

Muk joined WRDS in 2012 as a Product Manager and Architect. Before coming to WRDS, Muk spent more than a decade on Wall Street working in research and technology at MSD Capital, a multi-billion dollar investment firm. Muk began his career as a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He holds a BA and MS from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Feng Sheng is currently a ZJU 100 Young Professor of Marketing at Zhejiang University in China. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Marketing Department of the Wharton School and a fellow of Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. In his research, Feng seeks to understand the neurocomputational processes that underpin consumer behaviors. To study these hidden processes, he integrates ideas from marketing, neuroscience, psychology and economics, and combines a variety of tools including computational models, eye-tracking and brain imaging. He aims to leverage our understanding of the biological basis of consumer behavior and develop biometrics that can be used for marketing research and practice.

A tenured professor at The Wharton School, Dr. Taylor is an award-winning researcher and teacher with extensive expertise on issues related to corporate transparency, accounting fraud, insider trading, and corporate governance. A world-renown scholar, Professor Taylor leads the Forensic Analytics Lab at The Wharton School; has written more than 20 articles published in leading academic journals in accounting, finance, and management; led seminars at dozens of top business schools across the globe; and won numerous academic and industry awards.

Professor Taylor’s research targets practitioners and regulators, and aims to have direct relevance to current issues facing boards and shareholders. His research frequently appears in the business media; has been cited in rules and regulations promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission; and has informed multiple investigations by the SEC, FBI, Treasury, and Department of Justice. He has provided expert and consulting services related to best practices in corporate governance, regulatory investigations, and fraud prediction, and has co-developed and licensed intellectual property related to parsing SEC filings.

Professor Taylor teaches a cutting-edge undergraduate course––Forensic Analytics––that applies state-of-the-art analytics to SEC filings, and teaches a doctoral seminar on data analysis. His doctoral students have gone on to become faculty at a variety of leading business schools, including Stanford, MIT, and Chicago. Professor Taylor received his bachelor’s degree from University of Delaware, his master’s from Duke University, and his PhD from Stanford University.

Dr.  Vaughan received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2012, focused on using machine learning to understand decision-making behavior and the brain. His commercial work spans both tech and biotech, focused on development of novel machine learning tools to solve difficult business and technical problems. He is currently Chief Science Officer of Pymetrics, Inc. where he focuses on deployment of machine learning in the assessment space to maximize fairness, accountability, and transparency.

Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor and twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his appointment at Wharton and as the inaugural Rowan Fellow, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Annenberg School of Communication.

Before coming to Penn, Watts was a principal researcher and partner at Microsoft and a founding member of the Microsoft Research NYC lab. He was also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group.

His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett M. Rogers Award. In 2018, he was named an inaugural fellow of the Network Science Society.

Watts is the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton 2003), Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press 1999), and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (Crown Business 2011).

He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.

Professor Adi Wyner received his Bachelors degrees in Mathematics from Yale University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with distinction in his major. He was the recipient of the Stanley Prize for excellence in Mathematics. His PhD in Statistics is from Stanford University, where he won a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, the Abrams Prize and the Herz Foundation fellowship. After graduating from Stanford, he received the NSF post-graduate fellowship and a visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Wyner has been a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business for the last 11 years. He is a tenured Professor and the Chair of the Undergraduate Program in Statistics for the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Wyner is an expert at Probability Models and Statistics. His principle focus at Wharton has been research in Applied Probability, Information Theory and Statistical Learning. He has published more than 30 articles in leading journals in many different fields, including Applied Statistics, Applied Probability, Finance, Information Theory, Computer Science and Bio-Informatics. He has received grants from the NSF, NIH and private industry. Professor Wyner has participated in numerous consulting projects in various businesses. He was one the earliest consultants for TiVo, Inc, where he helped to develop early personalization software. Dr. Wyner created some of the first on-line data summarization tools, while acting as CTO for Surfnotes, Inc. More recently, he has developed statistical analyses for banks and marketing research firms and has served as consultant to several law firms in Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. In addition, he has served as statistical faculty advisor for the University Pennsylvania Law School. His interest in sports statistics has led to a collaboration with ESPN where Dr. Wyner was the PI on the ESPN funded MLB player evaluation research project. He has worked has also served as a statistical expert for hedge funds and private equity concerns.