Prof. Srikanth Jagabathula is the Robert Stansky Research Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics, at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2006, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008 and 2011, respectively. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty of NYU Stern as an Assistant Professor in the operations management area, where he is now a tenured associate professor. He was also on the faculty of Harvard Business School from 2018-2019 as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Technology and Operations Management.
Professor Jagabathula is a renowned researcher whose interests lie in the areas of choice modelling and the application of mathematical optimization techniques for operational decision-making. He has made significant contributions to the field by pioneering the use of rank-based choice models, which model user preferences through distributions over preference orderings or rank orderings.
Although these models first appeared in the economics literature several decades ago and have become the foundation for much of the utility and choice theory, their empirical success has been limited due to the difficulty of estimating them from data. Professor Jagabathula’s work has allowed these models to be applied to data and has unlocked their immense practical potential.
In addition to his contributions to choice modelling, Professor Jagabathula has also made fundamental contributions to the areas of nonparametric estimation techniques for choice models and solving large-scale price and assortment optimization problems. His research has helped firms overcome computational and scalable challenges that often arise in practice, making a significant impact on the field.
Professor Jagabathula is deeply committed to making an impact on practice through his work. He co-founded Celect Inc. to commercialize his Ph.D. dissertation work. Founded in 2012, Celect was one of the first to bring deep technology to solve operational problems facing traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. Celect’s technology was selected as one of the 50 great innovations produced by MIT CSAIL. His work has been implemented at several companies, including The Bon-Ton, Ford Motor Company, eBay.com, and AB InBev. He served as the Chief Scientist and Scientific Advisor to Arena AI and sits on the advisory board of ASQI, Inc. Recently, he co-founded Velai Inc., which focuses on predicting disease incidence levels to help hospitals optimize their resource planning. This startup was motivated by the work he did with the New Jersey governor’s office to help with hospital resource planning during COVID.
Professor Jagabathula has received numerous awards and has three patents to his name. He has also given over 100 talks internationally, both at academic and industry venues, and serves as an associate editor on the boards of Management Science and Operations Research – two of the most prestigious journals within the operations research and management areas.
He has also received numerous awards and accolades including the NSF CAREER Award (2015); the POMS Wickham Skinner Early-Career Researcher Award (2018); the Poets and Quants 40 Best Business Professors Under 40 (2018); the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize (2015); the Best OM Paper in Management Science Award (2016); IIT Bombay President of India Medal (2006); the Best Master’s Thesis Award (2008); and the NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award (2008).
Hobbies: “I like reading philosophy, history, and fiction. I love traveling to the same place multiple times, so I become familiar with a place and feel like a local.”