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Our team

Ryan Webb photo

Ryan Webb, Academic Director

Ryan is an Associate Professor of Marketing. His research integrates neuroscience, psychology, and economics to provide insight into consumer behaviour. He is interested in how choices can be predicted using neural data, how our brains encode and perceive value, and how neural computations influence human (and monkey) choice behaviour. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Queen’s University and research fellowships at New York University and the California Institute of Technology.

Mitch Hoffman, Faculty Fellow

Mitch is a labor and personnel economist, as well as an Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management. In addition, Mitch is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a Co-director for the NBER Personnel Economics working group. His research focuses on the study of determinants of workplace productivity, working at the intersection of labor economics, personnel & organizational economics, and behavioral economics. He is particularly interested in questions related to hiring, both in terms of strategic considerations for firms and in terms of consequences for workers and society.

Azarakhsh Malekian

Azarakhsh Malekian, Faculty Fellow

Azarakhsh is an Associate Professor of Operations Management and Statistics at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management. Her research interests include algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, market design, and networks, working at the intersection of computer science, operations, and economics. She is particularly interested in questions related to data markets and issues related to social networks and privacy.

Photo of Jay Cao

Jay Cao, Senior Research Associate

Jay is the first point of contact for the lab's day-to-day activities. He has extensive experience in data management, big data technology and research computation on high performance computing platforms. Jay is instrumental in supporting an analytics computing platform, and helps students and researchers apply big data and machine learning tools to solve complex management problems.

E: Jay.Cao@rotman.utoronto.ca

Meghan Chayka, Data Scientist in Residence

Meghan is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Stathletes, a sports analytics and insights business that provides industry leading data precision within the sport of hockey. Meghan has built a team in Niagara, Waterloo and Toronto working on creating the new era of sports technology. Having a wide variety of clients, Meghan was named in the 2018/2019 season Top Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Ontario Chamber of Commerce), Top 40 under 40 (The Athletic NHL), and on the Top 100 of Power & Influence in the Hockey News. At Rotman, she plays a key role in shaping the data science education and research through her work at the TD Management Data and Analytics Lab, including involvement in external, internal, and student-led events focused on data science.

E: Meghan@stathletes.com  Twitter  LinkedIn

 

Rozhina Ghanavi, Research Associate

Rozhina is working on bringing cutting-edge machine learning methods to solve management and business problems. Rozhina graduated from the University of Toronto with a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She focused on using deep generative models to solve challenges in various domains including computer vision and healthcare. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Tehran. Before joining Rotman, Rozhina spent some time at a startup working on training large language embedding models.

E: rozhina.ghanavi@rotman.utoronto.ca

Brian Keng

Brian Keng, Data Scientist in Residence

Brian is Research Director at Borealis AI, a research centre created by Royal Bank of Canada, and an Adjunct Professor in Data Science at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. At Borealis, he leads the incubator program building out innovative AI-enabled products and capabilities for the financial services industry.  At Rotman, he plays a key role in shaping data science education and research through his work with the TD Management Data and Analytics Lab and the Master of Management Analytics program, and by working directly with faculty and students.

E: Brian.Keng@rotman.utoronto.ca  Twitter  LinkedIn

Valeria Sladojevic-Sola, Special Projects and Engagement Officer

Val manages all operational aspects of the lab with a focus on executive administration, communications and events. 

E: Val.Sladojevic.Sola@rotman.utoronto.ca