Business Advancement Center for Health Expertise

Meet Carlson Faculty with Research in Healthcare

Check back regularly as faculty members continue to be added to this list.

 Cyrus Aghamolla, PhD

Assistant Professor, Accounting

Dr. Aghamolla's research focuses on the financing decisions of private firms in the biopharmaceutical industry and how such decisions impact innovation, as well as the role of financial frictions on hospital performance and healthcare delivery.

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Xuan Bi, PhD

Assistant Professor, Information & Decision Sciences

Dr. Bi's research focuses on the interface of statistics, machine learning, and information systems which aims at creating and applying data-driven methodologies to address real-world, large-scale, business, and scientific problems around data privacy, healthcare recommender systems, and imaging genetics. 

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Caroline Carlin, PhD

Adjunct Professor, Finance

Dr. Carlin’s research leverages her knowledge of the healthcare and insurance industries and a thorough understanding of econometrics. Her recent research focuses on how choices are made in delivering and financing healthcare services and how this environment impacts the cost and quality of care, particularly for patients with diabetes. She earned a PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Minnesota and subsequently held a faculty position in the Department of Applied Economics. Her pre-academic career informs Dr. Carlin’s research as a healthcare actuary (earning a Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries), and as director of benefits for a national discount retailer. Her research is often supported using large health plan administrative data, survey data, and software packages such as SAS (including proc sql) and Stata. She continues as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Applied Economics. She regularly teaches health economics and econometrics courses for the Department of Applied Economics, Carlson School of Management, and the College of Continuing and Professional Studies. 

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Russell Funk, PhD

Assistant Professor, Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship

Dr. Funk's research is driven by the idea that the growing availability of large administrative, government, and web data sets creates novel opportunities for management research. He has been active in applying big data tools to social science. His research has appeared in leading management and healthcare journals. 

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Kartik Ganju

Assistant Professor, Information & Decision Sciences

Dr. Ganju's research examines the impact of Information Technology on healthcare. He uses quantitative methods to identify how the introduction of technology in hospitals can impact healthcare costs, labor, and racial disparities. Dr. Ganju is currently studying how technology has been utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide healthcare (via telemedicine), and the disparities this may create. A current project examines how work from home negatively influences female physicians by forcing them to juggle their familial and professional responsibilities.

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Pinar Karaca-Mandic, PhD

BACH Founding Director, Professor, Finance

As a health economist, Dr. Karaca-Mandic's vision is to improve "value" in healthcare. Guided by this vision, her research made contributions to the literature in four key areas to understand: 1) Value and diffusion of medical technologies; 2) Uptake of clinical guidelines and response to evidence on safety and effectiveness; 3) Access and affordability of healthcare and role of the health insurance marketplace; 4) Assessing competition, frictions and their impact in quality and costs. These areas dynamically interact with each other and involve an interplay of healthcare consumers, patients, physicians, healthcare organizations, medical technology producers, and public and private third-party payers. Her research examines interactions between these components and the impact of regulation and market incentives.  

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Susan Meyer-Goldstein, PhD

Associate Professor, Supply Chain and Operations

Dr. Meyer-Goldstein's interests are in designing and delivering healthcare services, including service process design, management, and improvement. Her teaching interests are in service management, operations strategy, and general operations management. She is the recipient of the 2011 and 2019 Carlson School Teaching Awards, and the 2016 Carlson School Outstanding Service Award.

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Anant Mishra, PhD

Associate Professor, Supply Chain and Operations

Dr. Mishra's current research interests derive from contemporary real-world issues in innovation, public sector operations, public health supply chains, and emerging market operations. Dr. Mishra focuses on public health supply chains, precision medicine, and vaccine development in emerging markets. 

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Karthik Natarajan, PhD

Assistant Professor, Supply Chain and Operations

Dr. Natarajan's research interests are in social responsibility and humanitarian and non-profit operations, with a specific focus on global public health. Within this context, his works have explored several key issues, including understanding the impact of uncertainty and delays in donor funding, designing incentives for patients and healthcare providers to maximize the number of people benefitting from a humanitarian healthcare program, and identifying supply chain strategies to lower the likelihood of stock-outs of essential health commodities (e.g., reproductive health supplies) at last-mile facilities in developing countries. He has consulted for global health agencies, including USAID, and works with Minneapolis-based non-profits.  

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Stephen T. Parente, PhD

Carlson Global Institute Associate Dean, Professor, Finance

As a Professor in the Finance Department, Dr. Parente specializes in health economics, information technology, and health insurance.  Dr. Parente has been the principal investigator on extensive funded studies regarding consumer-directed health plans, health information technology, and health policy micro-simulation. 

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Demi Radeva

Adjunct Faculty, Finance

Ms. Radeva is a seasoned healthcare business strategist and advisor responsible for partnering with executives to provide thought leadership, strategic direction, market analysis, partnership sourcing, and support to guide growth and operational excellence. Strong knowledge of competitive dynamics, customer needs, regulatory impacts, market trajectory, and business capabilities has enabled buy-in for many strategic approaches and proposals.

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Akshay Rao, MBA, PhD

Professor, General Mills Chair in Marketing, Marketing Department (Department Chair)

Dr. Akshay Rao is Chair of the Marketing Department and the Carlson School and is one of the academic world's foremost authorities on the subject.  His research interests encompass marketing management--Behavioral and information economics perspectives on pricing strategy, brand management, channels, and product strategy-- and consumer behavior--information processing, behavioral decision theory, political persuasion, and cognitive neuroscience.  Recent contributions to healthcare research include pioneering work on the mechanics of vaccine hesitancy and the means of combatting it within a population.

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Soumya Sen, PhD

Associate Professor, McKnight Presidential Fellow, Information & Decision Sciences

Dr. Sen's research uses computer science, analytics, and economics to develop data and technology-based solutions to challenging societal problems, including medical device safety and security, pandemic response, addiction treatment, healthcare disparities, and the digital divide in Internet access.

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Rachna Shah, PhD

Professor, Supply Chain and Operations

Dr. Shah's healthcare research focuses on achieving superior performance and reducing operational failures and examines three broad questions. 1) at the macro level, issues facing bio-pharma and medical device firms in developing, manufacturing, and managing post-market outcomes; 2) at the micro level, issues facing healthcare systems in delivering healthcare; and 3) at the policy level, the role of regulatory agencies such as the FDA, NHTSA, and JCAHO in inspecting and certifying such organizations. In the first stream at the macro level, she has identified leading causes of product recalls in diverse industry settings. At the micro level, Dr. Shah has shown how variability in hand-off activities negatively impacts patient outcomes. In examining policy implications, she has demonstrated where and when inspections are a reliable indicator of future product quality, such as reduced product recalls. Dr. Shah's current research projects are at the interface of the three questions. One current project, for instance, examines the impact of the FDA’s breakthrough drug policy on adverse events, product recalls, and drug shortages.

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Kingshuk Sinha, PhD

Professor, Elmer L. Anderson Chair in Sustainable Supply Chain, Supply Chain and Operations (Department Chair)

Dr. Sinha's research focus in healthcare includes managing supply chain risks with the rapid growth in adverse events and recalls related to medical devices and drugs; reducing the disparities in physical and mental healthcare delivery in underserved communities; evaluating the implications of scientific and technological advancements (e.g., surgical robots, precision medicine, telemedicine, and mobile apps) for managing health care supply chains with a focus on improving affordability, access, and awareness; and designing and sustaining the pandemic (COVID-19) care supply chain and evaluating the impact of a pandemic (COVID-19) on the mental and physical health care supply chains

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Richard T. Thakor, PhD

Assistant Professor, Finance

Dr. Thakor focuses his research in healthcare finance on the effect of financial frictions on drug development and healthcare delivery.

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Mochen Yang, PhD

Assistant Professor, Information & Decision Sciences

Dr. Yang's research revolves around algorithmic decision-making and consists of three connected streams. In the first work stream, he studies the problem of designing theoretically robust and computationally efficient algorithms and strategies to support decision-making in information-intensive marketplaces. In the second work stream, he examines the antecedents of algorithmic decision-making and its impact on decision quality, fairness, and privacy. In the third stream of work, he designs novel approaches to draw robust statistical inferences with variables generated by machine learning algorithms. His research has appeared in leading management information systems journals and conferences.

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Aks Zaheer, PhD

Professor, Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Strategic Management, Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship

Dr. Zaheer's current research examines the antecedents and consequences of interfirm and organizational networks, the antecedents and consequences of trust in organizations and interfirm exchange, and phenomena such as innovation and strategic alliances, in contexts such as healthcare and medical devices, among others. He has published in many journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Academy of Management Journal, receiving the School's Outstanding Research Award in 2014 and 2021. He is currently Dean of the Fellows of the Strategic Management Society (elected Fellow in 2014). 

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