Faculty

Guy David is the Gilbert and Shelley Harrison Professor of Health Care Management and Department Chair in the Health Care Management Department at the Wharton School and a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Medical Ethics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the doctoral program in Health Care Management and Economics and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor David is also an associate editor of the American Journal of Health Economics and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Economics and Management.

His research interests include the dynamics of mixed-ownership competition in health care markets, evaluation of policies towards nonprofit providers, industrial organization and regulation of post-acute care, the economics and organization of emergency medical services, division of labor along the care continuum, patient centered medical care, welfare effects of specialty hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers, and direct-to-consumer advertising and drug safety.

Professor David teaches undergraduate, MBA and PhD courses in Health Economics and Health Care Delivery at Wharton. He is a past recipient of the Teaching Commitment and Curricular Innovation Award, which is awarded in recognition of contributions to the educational experience of Wharton’s students. He received his BA and MA in Economics from Tel Aviv University, and his PhD in Business Economics from the University of Chicago.

Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.

In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta Equity Partners to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”

Fader is the author of “Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage” (2020) and co-authored “The Customer Centricity Playbook” with Sarah Toms (2018). He has won many awards for his research and teaching accomplishments. Among these achievements, he was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers” in 2017, and was the only academic on the list.

Dean Knox is a computational social scientist developing new methods for the study of complex and high-dimensional data. His research includes policing, speech analysis, ethnic politics, and political communication. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Science, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Political Science Review. It has received the Gosnell Prize for excellence in political methodology, the John T. Williams dissertation prize, and the best poster award by the Society for Political Methodology. For details, see www.dcknox.com

Dr. Olivia S. Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor; Professor of Insurance/Risk Management and Business Economics/Policy; Executive Director of the Pension Research Council; and Director of the Boettner Center on Pensions and Retirement Research; all at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Concurrently, Dr. Mitchell serves as a Research Associate at the NBER; Independent Director on the Wells Fargo Fund Boards; Co-Investigator for the Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan; Member of the Executive Board for the Michigan Retirement Research Center; and Senior Research Scholar at the Singapore Management University. She also advises the UNSW Centre for Pensions and Superannuation; is Faculty Affiliate of the Wharton Public Policy Initiative; and serves as Vice President of the American Economic Association. She received the MA and PhD degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the BA in Economics from Harvard University.

Professor Mitchell’s professional interests focus on public and private pensions, insurance and risk management, financial literacy, and public finance. Her research explores how systematic longevity risk and financial crises can shape household portfolios and work patterns over the life cycle, the economics and finance of defined contribution pensions, financial literacy and wealth accumulation, and claiming behavior for Social Security benefits. She has published over 260 books and articles. She was awarded the FINRA Investor Education Foundation Ketchum Prize; the Fidelity Pyramid Prize for research improving lifelong financial well-being; the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession; and the Roger F. Murray First Prize (twice) from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance. She was also honored with the Premio Internazionale Dell’Istituto Nazionale Delle Assicurazioni from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. Her study of Social Security reform won the Paul Samuelson Award for “Outstanding Writing on Lifelong Financial Security” from TIAA-CREF.

Previously Professor Mitchell chaired Wharton’s Department of Insurance and Risk Management, and before that, she taught economics at Cornell University. She also served as a Commissioner on the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security; a Member of the US Department of Labor’s ERISA Advisory Council; on the Board of Directors of Alexander and Alexander Services, Inc.; the Advisory Board for the Central Provident Fund of Singapore; the Board of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession; and the GAO Advisory Board. She also co-chaired the Technical Panel on Trends in Retirement Income and Saving for the Social Security Advisory Council, and she served as a Commissioner on the Chilean Pension Reform Commission.

Professor Mitchell has visited numerous institutions including Harvard University, the NBER, Cornell University, the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Singapore Management University, and the University of New South Wales. She has also consulted with groups including the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the Investment Company Institute, the President’s Economic Forum, the World Bank, the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, the White House Conference on Social Security, the Q Group, and the Association of Flight Attendants. She has testified for the US Congress, the UK Parliament, the Australian Parliament, the US Department of Labor, and the Brazilian Senate. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese, having lived and worked in Latin America, Europe, and Australasia.

Michael R. Roberts is the William H. Lawrence Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliate of the Institute for Law and Economics and the Wharton Financial Institutions Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Roberts’ research spans corporate finance, banking, and asset pricing. Recent work has examined equity pricing anomalies, collateralized loan obligation (CLO) performance, and the effect of interest rates on bank lending. His research has received several awards including two Brattle Prizes for Distinguished Paper published in the Journal of Finance, a Jensen Prize for best paper on Corporate Finance and Organizations published in the Journal of Financial Economics, and Best Paper awards from the Financial Management Association, Southwestern Finance Association, and Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research. Professor Roberts has served on numerous journal editorial boards, including the Journal of Finance of which he was a co-editor.

In addition to his research, Professor Roberts has earned multiple teaching awards. At the Wharton School, his accolades include the David W. Hauk Award and half a dozen additional teaching awards at the undergraduate and MBA levels. While at Duke University, he won the Daimler-Chrysler Core Teaching Award at the Fuqua School of Business. He has taught undergraduate, M.B.A., Ph.D., and executive education courses in Finance, Economics, Statistics, and Data Analytics. Outside of academia, Professor Roberts has worked as a financial engineer and consultant, providing services to many financial and nonfinancial corporations as well as expert testimony in corporate legal matters.

Professor Roberts earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California at San Diego, and his M.A. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Lori Rosenkopf is the Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Simon and Midge Palley Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph. D in Management of Organizations from Columbia University after working as a systems engineer for Eastman Kodak and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Prior to that, Lori earned her B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and her M.S in Operations Research from Stanford University.

Since joining the faculty in 1993, Lori has taught courses for undergraduates, MBAs, and doctoral students, as well as for executive education and online participants. She received the Hauck Award for distinguished teaching in the undergraduate program. Lori served two terms as the Vice Dean and Director of the Wharton Undergraduate Division from 2013-2019, where her accomplishments included introducing the new Wharton undergraduate curriculum, elevating alternative curricular and career pathways, and growing diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Lori’s research examines technological communities and social networks across several high-tech industries. She analyzes how and when knowledge may flow between technical professionals and between firms, mapping these flows in order to estimate when people, firms, and technologies are likely to learn, move, and succeed. Her research has been published in leading journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Lori has also served as a Senior Editor for the journal Organization Science and as a consultant for the National Academy of Sciences, and she has been elected a member of the Macro-Organizational Behavior Society and also to a term as the Chair of the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management.

A tenured professor at the Wharton School, Dr. Taylor is an award-winning researcher and teacher with extensive expertise on issues related to financial disclosures, accounting fraud, insider trading, and corporate governance. A world-renown scholar, Professor Taylor has written more than 20 articles on these topics published in the leading academic journals in accounting, finance, and management; led seminars at over 100 leading business schools across the globe; won numerous academic and industry awards; and serves on the editorial boards of several top academic journals.

Professor Taylor’s research targets practitioners and regulators, and aims to have direct relevance to current issues facing boards and shareholders. His research is frequently cited in business media, in trade publications, and in rules and regulations promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His research has been presented at multiple regulatory and enforcement agencies including the SEC, the Public Company Audit Oversight Board, and the Southern District of New York; and has informed multiple investigations by the FBI, Treasury, and Department of Justice.

Professor Taylor teaches an undergraduate course that applies state-of-the-art analytics to topics in corporate disclosure, corporate governance, and accounting fraud, and supervises doctoral dissertations on these topics. His doctoral students have gone on to become faculty at a variety of leading business schools, including Stanford, MIT, and Chicago.

Professor Taylor received his bachelor’s degree from University of Delaware, his master’s from Duke University, and his PhD from Stanford University.

Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen is the Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor and Professor of Statistics in the Statistics Department at Wharton.  His research is primarily related to semiparametric theory with applications in causal inference, missing data problems, statistical genetics and mixed models theory.  His work is largely motivated by healthcare applications sponsored by grants from various institutes at NIH, including currently as the principal investigator of three major R01 grants from NIAID, NIA and NCI to develop state of the art statistical methods to combat HIV, Cancer, and dementia and related illness.  Professor Tchetgen Tchetgen was a founding editor of Epidemiologic Methods, a journal dedicated to dissemination of advanced epidemiologic methods; in addition, he currently serves on the editorial boards of American Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Observational Studies.  With over 200 peer reviewed publications in top statistics and medical journals, Professor Tchetgen Tchetgen has made numerous contributions to advancing public health research and practice. In addition to academic research, Professor Tchetgen Tchetgen also serves as Consultant to several of the world leading Pharmaceutical Companies and is currently an Amazon Scholar working with Amazon to develop state of the art methods at the intersection of Machine Learning and Causality to evaluate the business impact of various forms of market interventions.

Susan M. Wachter is the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and co-director of Penn Institute for Urban Research. From 1998 to 2001, Dr. Wachter served as assistant secretary for policy development and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the Wharton School, she was Chairperson of the Real Estate Department until her 1998 appointment to HUD. She founded and currently serves as director of Wharton’s Geographical Information Systems Lab. She was the editor of Real Estate Economics from 1997 to 1999 and currently serves on the editorial boards of several real estate journals. Academic publications include more than 200 scholarly articles and 15 books. She currently serves on the Fannie Mae National Housing Advisory Committee and on the Financial Research Advisory Committee for the Office of Financial Research in the US Department of the Treasury.

Duncan Watts is the twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his appointment at the Annenberg School, he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Department of Operations, Information and Decisions in the Wharton School, where he is the inaugural Rowan Fellow.

Before coming to Penn, Watts was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He was also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR in 2012, he was a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group.

His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review, and has been recognized by the 2009 German Physical Society Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics, the 2013 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for Complexity Science, and the 2014 Everett M. Rogers Award. In 2018, he was named an inaugural fellow of the Network Science Society.

Watts is the author of three books: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton 2003), Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press 1999), and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer (Crown Business 2011).

He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.

Kevin Werbach is professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. A world-renowned expert on emerging technologies, he examines business and policy implications of developments such as AI, broadband, gamification, and blockchain.

Werbach served on the Obama Administration’s Presidential Transition Team, founded the Supernova Group (a technology conference and consulting firm), helped develop the U.S. approach to internet policy during the Clinton Administration, and created one of the most successful massive open online courses, with over 500,000 enrollments. His books include For the Win (2015), The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust(2018), and After the Digital Tornado (2020).

Follow him on Twitter @kwerb.