3 minute read
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
David Anderson’s Juggling Act
David Anderson, PhD, leads a full and varied life, on campus and off. As the Michele and Christopher Iannaccone ’91 Assistant Professor, Management & Operations, he draws upon his experience in business, research and academics.
When he’s not in the classroom or conducting research, he finds time to practice piano and play with his two—soon to be three—children. “Our third child is due in January. We’re hoping for a New Year’s baby,” Dr. Anderson says.
He joined VSB in 2018 after serving as assistant professor at the City University of New York, Baruch College, and his background includes several generations of academics and health care professionals. Growing up in Cleveland, his father was a biochemist on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University before moving to the National Institutes of Health in 2009. His mother is a nurse and his wife a pulmonologist.
These influences shaped his graduate school experience, which included building predictive models in health care, national security and pay equity. “I enjoy using data to solve problems and to understand how things work. When I graduated with a BS in Applied Mathematics from William and Mary in 2009—at the height of the Great Recession—jobs were scarce,” he explained. So he pursued his PhD in Operations Management at the University of Maryland, College Park.
His interest in data and modeling persisted. “Predictive modeling provides a toolkit to solve a variety of problems,” Dr. Anderson says. The toolkit is only part of what goes into solving problems, however. “Data is collected by human beings, and everyone comes with their own lens. Bias is built in and can be well hidden. That’s why cross-disciplinary teams are so important.”
An opportunity in his PhD program led him to working with Margrét Bjarnadóttir, an Icelandic associate professor of Management Science and Statistics at Robert H. Smith School of Business. Iceland had recently passed a law requiring pay equity for women. “A friend of Margrét’s asked her to help look into whether they had a pay equity issue at their company,” Dr. Anderson says. Together, they determined the company did have an issue and were eventually tasked with helping solve it.
Later, he and Dr. Bjarnadóttir co-founded PayAnalytics, a company that helps firms discover and solve their pay equity issues. “Founding a company allowed me to better understand the pressures businesses operate under,” Dr. Anderson says.
The experience led Dr. Anderson to become even more passionate about equity issues. He now serves as an internal adviser to VISIBLE—Villanova Initiative to Support Inclusiveness and Build Leaders—which is part of the Office of the Provost and partners with the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women’s Leadership to form a cohesive team to advance intersectional gender equity. Dr. Anderson’s varied background and expansive curiosity has influenced his teaching as well. “We used sports data to learn R [a programming language used in data analytics],” he says. “The data sets have improved since Moneyball and they are freely available. The students love it.”
They do indeed—a former student recently emailed Dr. Anderson to express appreciation for the class, noting how much he learned and how much he’s using R in his work.
That appreciation is mutual.
The real world is messy and inaccurate. Data doesn’t live in a vacuum, and for it to be useful, the tools we build have to be usable in real-world settings.”
–Dr. David Anderson
–Dr. David Anderson
