Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy

James Walton Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Lee Branstetter joined the Heinz College faculty in 2006 as a tenured associate professor. 

Branstetter is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2011-2012, he served as the Senior Economist for International Trade and Investment for the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon, he was the Daniel J. Stanton Associate Professor of Business and the Director of the International Business Program at Columbia Business School. Branstetter has also taught at the University of California, Davis, where he was the Director of the East Asian Studies Program, and at Dartmouth College. He has served as a consultant to the OECD Science and Technology Directorate, the Advanced Technology Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the World Bank. In recent years, Branstetter has been a research fellow of the Keio University Global Security Research Institute and a visiting fellow of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry in Japan. Branstetter holds a B.A. in Economics and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences (MMSS) from Northwestern University, and he earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1996.

I'm an associate professor in Heinz College, which is part of Carnegie Mellon University, and contains the Schools of Public Policy and Information Systems. I also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Statistics.

My research interests are statistics and machine learning in network settings. This includes community detection, other network models involving latent variables or unsupervised learning, and causal inference in the presence of social network effects (i.e., interference between units).

I was a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where my advisor was Benjamin Van Roy. I've also worked as a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, as a postdoc in the School of Engineering at Harvard University, and as a visiting postdoc in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley.

Mark is CEO and cofounder of Musing AI, an AI service that helps seniors deal with the overhead of life. Previously, he was CEO of Bloomfield (acquired by Kubota Corporation), which assesses specialty crops for growers across the US, EU, Africa, and South America. Prior to that, he was CEO and cofounder of RoadBotics (acquired by Michelin), which used AI to assess roadway infrastructure for cities across seven countries. Earlier, he was a cofounder of kWantix Trading (acquired by Moody Aldrich Partners), a quant energy hedge fund, and a cofounder and CEO of kWantera, an AI-powered energy trading company. He was also CEO of Think Through Learning (acquired by Imagine Learning), an online tutoring company, and US Managing Director of ANGLE Technology, PLC, a UK-based venture capital firm and consultancy.  Earlier in his career, Mark served as the Director of Government Relations for Texas Instruments, held policy positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the George H. W. Bush Administration, and worked on the staff of US Senator John Heinz as well as two US Representatives. He was a management consultant with Booz Allen as well. Mark is currently an adviser to Cybernetix Ventures, L.E.K. Consulting, and Cascadia Capital. He is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University and coauthor of the soon-to-be-released book, Practical AI: Building and Using AI in the Real World (Taylor & Francis Publisher) He holds an MS in technology management from The American University, a PhD in public policy from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a doctorate in business administration from the Fox School of Business at Temple University. Mark also completed the AI Academy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Venture Capital sessions at Wharton.

Pedro Ferreira is Associate Dean for Executive Education and Full Professor of Information Systems and Economics at Heinz College, with a joint appointment in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am an Associate Teaching Professor at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

I completed a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2015-2019, where I also served as the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program from 2018-2019. I completed my PhD and MA in English Literature at the University of Florida. I completed my BA in Creative Writing and English at Emory University.

My research focuses on children’s and young adult literature and culture, especially on the social and intellectual history of children’s literature in the United States. I am especially interested in markers of prestige and popularity, such as prizes, bestseller lists, and “best of” lists and how they serve to circulate various forms of capital (social, cultural, political, economic) in the children’s literature field. I have written about these issues in multiple publications, including an article on the NYTimes creation of a Children’s Best Seller list in response to the Harry Potter phenomenon and a book chapter on how blockbuster book culture is creating a new hyper-canon of children’s and YA texts.

My work, including my dissertation titled “The Chronicles of Professionalization: The Expert, the Child, and the Making of American Children’s Literature,” looks at the various forms of expertise and professionalism that shapes the field of children’s literature. I am currently working on a Digital Humanities project, analyzing a corpora of texts drawn from one of these early “book women,” Caroline Hewins. Her 1882 list of “Books for the Young” is often cited as a foundational canonical project in the field of children’s literature; my work makes use of data mining techniques and stylometric analysis to look at the similarities and defining characteristics of the books selected for children at this early date.

He received a BS in Economics and Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University.

Kristen Kurland is a Teaching Professor of Architecture, Information Systems, and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and School of Architecture. She also holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the College of Engineering at CMU and a faculty adjunct appointment, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

In addition to her academic appointments, Professor Kurland served as President of Carnegie Mellon University’s Andrew Carnegie Society and, as its President, was a University Trustee from 2014-2016. 

She is the chair of the Geographical Geospatial Science Committee of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She also serves on the National Academy of Sciences Board on Earth Sciences and Resources.

Lindsay's research focuses on how the implementation of increasingly advanced and complex technologies are shifting how, and with whom, we work in teams. She adopts an interdisciplinary lens, integrating work from organizational behavior, psychology, communication, and human-computer interaction, to further organizational theorizing on leading and working in teams in the digital age. In particular, Lindsay is interested in the interpersonal dynamics and functioning of the people in technologically-advanced teams, from human-AI teams to cross-functional, geographically distributed science teams.

Her research has been published in journals including Academy of Management Discoveries, The Leadership Quarterly, Organizational Psychology Review, Computers in Human Behavior, and Small Group Research. Her dissertation received an Honorable Mention from the Psych of Tech Institute and was a finalist for the INGRoup J. Richard Hackman Award for the Dissertation that Most Significantly Advances the Study of Groups.

Lindsay earned a PhD and MA in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University and a BS in Psychology from the University of Florida. After completing her PhD, Lindsay worked as a postdoctoral research associate at UNC Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Prior to joining Heinz College, Lindsay was a faculty member in the College of Business at Florida International University.

Beibei Li is Anna Loomis McCandless Chair and Professor of IT and Management at Heinz College. She hold joint appointment at Tepper School of Business and courtesy appointment at School of Computer Science (Human-Computer Interaction Institute). She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Leonard N. Stern School of Business at NYU.

Beibei’s research interests lie at the intersection between social and technical aspects of technology. She is especially interested in the interaction between human decisions and recent technological disruptions. Specifically, the ubiquitous digitization of individual behavior across digital and physical environments provides us with a new lens through which we can better monitor, understand, and optimize individual decision-making. By looking into these digital footprints of individuals and their interactions with technologies, Beibei is interested in designing effective strategies for technology platforms and policymakers to improve technology design and economic welfare. To reach these goals, Beibei applies inter-disciplinary approaches combining econometrics, economic structural modeling, Bayesian modeling, and randomized experiments, with crowd-sourcing and machine learning/deep learning techniques.

Beibei is the recent recipient of the INFORMS ISS Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award in 2019 and the Anna Loomis McCandless Chair Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. Beibei's research has been published in Management Science, Marketing Science, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, and several tops IS, Economics, Marketing, and CS conferences. She is the winner of the Best Paper Award at the 20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011), two Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2012 and ICIS 2019), several Best Paper Awards at major journals and workshops in IT & Management (ISR, WITS, WISE, CIST). She has won three NSF Awards with over $3M total funding, five Faculty Research Awards from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Adobe, and Marketing Science Institute (MSI), and a WCAI Research Award from Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. Beibei is the winner of the Junior Marketing Researcher Award at the Big Data Marketing Conference 2015. She is also the winner of the INFORMS ISS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award, the ACM SIGMIS Best Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Herman E. Krooss Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2012-2013.

Prior to getting her Ph.D., Beibei held a BS and an MS in Computer Science. She also minored in Fashion Design.

Ganesh Mani is Faculty (Adjunct; previously Distinguished Service Professor of Innovation Practice and Inaugural Director of Collaborative AI at Tepper) involved in teaching, research and mentoring. Ganesh has worked on scaling human expertise via AI in many milieus. He co-founded Advanced Investment Technology (one of the earliest start-ups to combine investment management and machine learning), which was acquired by State Street Corporation, creating its Advanced Research Center for helping manage multibillion-dollar institutional portfolios. Ganesh has contributed to other AI start-ups, including an entity that is now part of Nasdaq-listed iCAD, employing machine learning techniques for early cancer detection. Ganesh has an MBA in finance, a PhD in AI from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT-Bombay. He is past-President and long-term board member of TiE's Pittsburgh chapter, co-MD of TiE Pittsburgh Angels; and on the advisory board of the FDP Institute as well as journals such as Financial Data Science and Patterns. Ganesh’s work has been patented, featured in a Barron’s cover story and published in leading academic journals and popular opinion pages. He has taught courses spanning Experiential Learning (incl. capstone projects) for Tepper MSBA students and AI Grand Challenges (overlapping with AI and Emerging Economies) for the CMU global audience (incl. students from Africa and Qatar campuses).