Business professor awarded for analytics skills
Photo courtesy of Sridahr Seshadri
Sridhar Seshadri, professor in Business, poses for a photo.
October 23, 2018
Sridhar Seshadri, professor in Business, was recently awarded the Alan J. and Joyce D. Baltz Professorship for his skills in business analytics.
In 2009, Alan and Joyce Baltz made a donation to the College of Business, which made the professorship possible, according to a press release from the Gies College of Business.
“When I look at the most striking part, it is the donor graduated a year after I was born,” Seshadri said. “So you have to understand that, sometimes we forget the deep connections that the University has with its students and alumni.”
Seshadri joined the University in 2018 and focuses on business administration. The topics of his research include supply chain and revenue management, stochastic modeling and applications in queueing systems, the press release said.
“I’m basically a modeler. I do stochastic modeling, and I also work with very large data sets these days,” Seshadri said.
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He said he also has background in managing and executing large programs.
“I come from the Indian School of Business where we were running a very large MBA and a business analytics program there,” Seshadri said. “I hope that experience carries forward here.”
In the next two to three years, the undergraduate business core curriculum will be changed to reflect how analytics and data science can change how both firms and people work in the world, Seshadri said.
“I think that’s the first school in the country or anywhere in the globe which is doing this in the undergraduate space in the business education. So I’ll be doing my best to help that, teach in that curriculum,” Seshadri said.
In the past, Seshadri said he has worked at Berkeley as a doctoral student, at New York University, at University of Texas-Austin and at the Indian School of Business. He mainly focused on finance, operational management, analytics, recruitment and leading different doctoral programs.
Seshadri said he thinks universities everywhere have a lot of great history, and the University has made an impact all around the world.
“From inside it’s not obvious, but from outside it’s such a powerful institution,” Seshadri said. “So it is because of donors like Alan and Joyce Baltz … that we are continuously able to do these things over time.”