Business Advancement Center for Health Faculty, Fellows, and Partners

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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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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Dr. Ertekin has developed a research stream that is grounded in practice with a strong managerial focus. His primary research interests center on retail operations and operations/marketing interface with an emphasis on omnichannel retailing, store labor, and the behavioral aspects of consumer returns. His research has been published in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Marketing Science, and Production and Operations Management. He has been an active member of the Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER, a Harvard Business School and The Wharton School initiation to facilitate partnership between academics and retail practitioners) since 2016 and has been invited to present his works at professional and practitioner conferences in North America. He has also consulted with several national retailers.

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

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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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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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Cyrus Aghamolla is an associate professor in accounting at Rice University, Jones Graduate School of Business. His research focuses on social learning, communication in capital markets, voluntary disclosure, adverse selection, initial public offerings, healthcare finance and private equity.

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Dr. Aysun Hızıroğlu Aygün is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ). She teaches labor economics, the economics of education, and health economics. Her research focuses on the evaluation of policies through empirical microeconomic studies, concentrating on women, children, and refugees. 

Her work was published in economics and health policy journals including the Journal of Health Economics and the International Journal of Health Planning and Management. 

She will visit the Business Center for Advancement in Health (BACH) at the University of Minnesota as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Her research has been funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) and the Economic Research Forum (ERF). She is a recipient of a career grant from TÜBİTAK through which she will build a research agenda about underlying mechanisms of mental health in Turkey. In 2020, she was a researcher on a project to study the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Turkish households. The project teams’ policy briefs received international and national recognition, had a media impact, and were featured in media coverages including print and television. 

In 2021-2022 she was the vice-president of İTÜ career center where she co-led essential projects including managing new graduates' labor force surveys. 

She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Northeastern University, and BA degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University. 

Research

My research interests are in empirical and theoretical corporate finance, with a particular focus on healthcare finance, household finance and financial intermediation. The central objective of my current research has been to gain insights on the economic consequences of rising healthcare costs on firms, households and the overall economy.

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Dr. Jeffery is a health services researcher at Mayo Clinic, where she serves as the Scientific Director of Emergency Medicine Research and as faculty in the department of Health Care Delivery Research and the Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery. Her research focuses on using real-world data to study the use of biologic drugs, biosimilars, and opioids in populations including Medicare Advantage and commercial beneficiaries, and in settings including emergency departments, post-surgery, and primary care.

RESEARCH

My research bridges the studies on finance and healthcare, which are two crucial academic fields in the broad economic literature. The connection is through two classical decisions in corporate finance: financing and investment. To conduct this research, I utilize novel datasets on granular operation and innovation information in the healthcare industry and apply both empirical and theoretical methods through the finance perspective. My research interest focuses on the financing of U.S. hospital industries and innovation investments in the healthcare industry.

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Dr. Zhu is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics at Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Kent State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Information and Decision Sciences from Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. His research interests lie in health IT, design science, network science and economics, and innovation and entrepreneurship. His recent research centers on employing data-driven empirical methodologies to unravel new IT-induced adverse outcomes in healthcare (e.g., medical device recall, human sedentary behavior) and developing theory-driven algorithmic approaches to predict these adverse outcomes. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Medical Care Research and Review. He has also presented his work at top information system conferences, including International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS), and Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). He is the recipient of NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program grant for technology commercialization and customer discovery, INFORMS ISS Design Science Award, Carlson Ph.D. Student Teaching Award, University of Minnesota Early Innovation Fund, University of Minnesota BOLD IDEAS grant, Carlson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and Best Doctoral Dissertation Proposal nominee at the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems.