Business Analytics and Statistics PhD Students

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan is a second-year doctoral student with research interests in applied statistics and machine learning in the supply chain domain. Harshvardhan earned his bachelor’s and master’s at the Indian Institute of Management Indore in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Before starting his doctoral journey, he worked briefly as an analyst for Merck US with Aspect Ratio, Merck’s analytics and forecasting center.

Yu Jiang
Yu Jiang is a first-year doctoral student with research interests in machine learning, statistics and business analytics. She earned her bachelor’s in coastal engineering from Harbin Engineering University in 2016, her master’s in civil engineering from Texas A&M University in 2018 and master of statistics from North Carolina State University in 2021.

Jinyi Liu
Jinyi Liu is a first-year doctoral student with research interests in the operations-marketing interface and business analytics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2021 and his master of arts in economics from the University of Rochester in 2022.

Jaachinma Somtochuksw Okafor
Jaachinma Somtochuksw Okafor is a first-ear doctoral student in business analytics and statistics. Her research interests include machine learning, data mining and visualization. She earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical electronic engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria, in 2018. Before starting the doctoral program, Okafor worked as a cybersecurity analyst at Interswitch.

Abdullah Salau

Senne Van Steelandt
Senne is a third-year doctoral student with research interests in the application of reinforcement learning to digital marketing. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business engineering from Ghent University in 2016 and 2018 respectively. Prior to starting the doctoral program, Senne worked as a student business intelligence developer at sympl.
Email: svanstee@vols.utk.edu