A statistician who spent seventeen years shipping systems, and then went back to school to study why students disengage

I trained as a statistician at the Indian Statistical Institute, which gave me a permanent bias toward evidence over intuition. That bias travelled well.

I spent close to seventeen years in technology delivery — analytics, data warehousing, application development, and program management — including a decade at Cognizant and years embedded with Citibank as a client. At the peak of that work I was accountable for roughly a $7M portfolio and organizations of more than 150 professionals across multiple locations.

What kept pulling my attention was not the technology. It was the human system around it: how people respond to incentives, why teams stop raising risks, what makes someone participate in a meeting and what makes them go quiet.

So I did a Ph.D. in Applied Economics / Information Systems at Ghent University, studying exactly that question in a setting where it is measurable: the classroom. I now teach at the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business at Saint Louis University, serve as interim director of the Emerson Leadership Institute, and co-founded Testing Algorithms to build the assessment tools this research keeps suggesting.

I build things because teaching kept producing problems that no existing product solved. Most of my inventions started as a workaround for one specific class session.