Miikka Rokkanen Joins the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative as a Senior Fellow

The Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative (WAIAI) is thrilled to welcome Miikka Rokkanen, a Principal Economist in the Customer Behavior Analytics unit at Amazon, to the team as a Senior Fellow. In Rokkanen’s role with Amazon, he has been helping to improve and support data-driven business decision-making across the company at a global scale for more than seven years. Prior to joining Amazon, he spent three years as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Columbia University, where his research and teaching focused on econometrics and labor economics. Rokkanen received his PhD in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 and his BSc and MSc in Economics from University of Jyvaskyla (Finland) in 2008.

As a Senior Fellow with WAIAI, Rokkanen will be involved with the AI & Analytics Accelerator – a month-long experiential learning project which pairs teams of students with companies to help solve real-world business problems. During the Accelerator, Rokkanen will help facilitate corporate partnerships and serve as an industry mentor for the student teams. “I wanted to join the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative because of the exciting opportunity to work with world-class faculty, staff, and students on important and intriguing problems,” he said. I also look forward to being able to serve as a resource to the students as they prepare for the next steps in their careers.”

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Miikka to the team,” said Eric Bradlow, Vice Dean of AI & Analytics at Wharton. “His experience and skillset merge perfectly at the intersection of education, analytics, and economics – a blend of skills and insights that will prove invaluable for both our student Accelerator teams and our corporate partners.”