The Lally School of Management

Lydia Manikonda is an Assistant Professor in the Lally School of Management who is also affiliated with the AIRC at RPI. Her passion is to build intelligent decision-making models that are capable of learning and reasoning. These models are built to address problems in the areas of business, public health and Technology. Her multidisciplinary research aims at using alternate sources of information such as social media platforms, online discussion forums, news articles, etc. to build models for analysis and decision-making.

Professor Kuruzovich’s course on database management integrates the technical challenges of managing data with the business challenges of deriving value through statistical analysis, visualization, and data mining. Professor Kuruzovich’s research broadly examines the means through which both individuals and organizations derive value from information systems and focuses on the intersection between information systems and marketing.

Gaurav Jain, associate professor of marketing at the Rensselaer Lally School of Management, examines how individuals make judgments, estimates, and decisions in the absence of complete information. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, Gaurav earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering and an MBA in marketing. More specifically, his research spans the fields of numerical cognition and judgment, working memory capacity, and, attention limitations.

Professor McDermott has taught courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels while at Rensselaer, and as a visiting faculty member at other schools. He has won multiple awards for his teaching.   Professor McDermott’s primary research interests focus on the link between the operations function and the overall goals of the organization, showing the strategic importance of operational decisions to overall competitiveness. His research falls into three main areas.

Professor Chanaka Edirisinghe has published extensively in management science and finance, focusing on portfolio optimization, risk management, derivative pricing, and firm fundamental strength analysis, as well as stochastic and quadratic programming theory and practice for large-scale applications. His research appears in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Quantitative Finance, among others.

Professor Clark's research focuses on financial intermediation and risk management with an emphasis on machine learning. He currently teaches several quantitative finance courses including Financial Computation and Simulation and Advanced AI/ML for Finance. Dr. Clark's work has been published in the Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial Stability, Quantitative Finance, and Operations Research Letters. He has been quoted in the U.S. News & World Report, the Times Union, and WalletHub.

Professor Francis conducts his research on issues in initial public offerings, corporate restructurings, and international asset-pricing. He has published numerous articles in reputed finance and economic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Journal of Macroeconomics. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Financial Stability.

Aparna Gupta is a professor of quantitative finance. She was the co-founder and co-director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Gupta has also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the Lally School of Management at RPI. Dr. Gupta was a visiting researcher at US SEC in Washington DC for three years.