Business School Faculty Tenured in 2024
Five Business School professors joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the leading edge of the disciplines.
Vanessa Burbano
Sidney Taurel Associate Professor of Business
Vaness Burbano is a leader in strategic management with a particular focus on corporate social responsibility. Her scholarship explores whether firms and organizations should engage in projects that have social value, including taking stances on issues such as immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortions, and elections.
Utilizing field experiments and online labor platforms, Dr. Burbano focuses on the issue from the perspective of how corporate social responsibility might impact employee behavior as well as on the consequences for stakeholders. Her papers have won numerous awards and have been published in top management and policy journals including Management Science, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. Her work has also received attention from media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.
Dr. Burbano earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2015.
Vanessa Burbano's Faculty Profile
Jing Dong
DeRosa Family Associate Professor of Business
Jing Dong is a leading operations research scholar focusing on combining applied probability and data analytics to improve the operational efficiency of service systems, especially healthcare delivery systems.
Dr. Dong has developed evidence-based and prediction-driven decision making tools to optimize the operation, such as staffing and resource allocation decisions, in healthcare delivery systems. Her research has also examined workforce models in the “gig” economy. Her work is noteworthy for combining predictive models with decision making in real-world application. She has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, in addition to several other NSF grants. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including Operations Research and Management Science.
Dr. Dong earned her PhD from Columbia University, and held an appointment at Northwestern University before joining the Columbia faculty in 2017.
Laura Doval
Chong Khoon Lin Professor of Business
Laura Doval is a leader in studying dynamic incentives in the areas of mechanism design, information and design and matching markets.
Dr. Doval’s work is primarily theoretical but has practical applications. A notable contribution to the field is her work on a novel methodology for characterizing optimal policies when agents have differing objectives and future directions cannot be committed to, something she explored in her publication, “Mechanism Design with Limited Commitment.” Dr. Doval has published in leading journals in her field such as Econometrica and the Journal of Political Economy, two of the top five journals in the field of economics. She has also published in other top publications such as Journal of Economic Theory and Theoretical Economics. Her work has received numerous awards and recognitions including, most recently, a 2024 Sloan Fellowship, the inaugural Arrow Prize from the Econometric Society, and Theoretical Economics Best Paper Prize.
Dr. Doval earned her PhD from Northwestern University. She served on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology before joining the Columbia faculty in 2020.
Sandra Matz
David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business
Sandra Matz is a leading scholar in marketing and business management with a background in psychology and computer science. She applies sophisticated big data analytics to gain insight into how online interactions are indicative of personality and how these insights can be leveraged to predict and influence the behavior of individuals and businesses. She compliments her big data approach with tools from psychology, including experimental designs and large-scale field studies as well as neuroscience and biometrics.
Dr. Matz’ key publications include “Founder Personality and Entrepreneurial Outcomes: A Large-scale Field Study of Technology Startups,” which explores whether the personality traits of the founders of tech start-ups are related to the success of these start-ups at various stages. Other work focuses on how to employ psychological targeting via online platforms for a range of purposes, including not just how to increase the effectiveness of persuasion campaigns by tailoring them to the personality traits of the target, but also to improve an employee’s personality and performance, as well as to regulate privacy and limit the manipulation of individual-level data. Dr. Matz has published in the top journals of her fields, including the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Matz earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2017.
Kairong Xiao
Roger F. Murray Associate Professor of Finance
Kairong Xiao is a leading financial economist specializing in financial intermediation, corporate finance, monetary economics and banking.
Dr. Xiao's research integrates economic theory with data to gain insight into the causal mechanisms in financial markets. One focus of his research examines how monetary policy affects the economy through the financial system. Another research stream is estimating the economic impact of financial regulation. Ten of his eleven peer-reviewed papers accepted for publication to date have appeared in the top journals in the field of finance, economics, and management, including Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Econometrica, and Management Science. He has also received multiple “best paper” awards and was awarded the RFS Rising Scholar Award. His scholarship has direct practical implications, and his studies have helped explain, for example, the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank and how financial intermediaries such as banks have changed their strategies to adapt to increasing regulation following the 2008 financial crisis.
Dr. Xiao earned his PhD from the University of British Columbia. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2017.