I am a PhD student at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.  My research focuses on the planning and scheduling of advertising from an operations management perspective.  In particular, I am interested in what I call Guaranteed Targeted Display Advertising: a class of advertising that includes webpage banner ads, dynamic in-game advertising (ads that are seamlessly placed into video games like this one), and the next generation of digital TV.  This is the class of advertising in which impressions (page views or eyeballs) are sold in advance, targeting constraints exist that restrict which viewers can be used to service each campaign (i.e. only women in California aged 25-34 can be shown Nike's tennis ads), accurate accounting and reporting is available to quantitatively track the progress of each campaign, and penalty costs are incurred at the end of a campaign if agreed-upon impression goals are not met.

Technology is enabling this class of advertising to grow, creating new ways of selling advertising, and with this growth come new opportunities for the effective management of ad inventory.  In this industry, "supply" or "inventory" refers to the projected audience size.  Buyers (those that wish to run an ad, such as Nike) purchase ad inventory (eyeballs) from viewers, through an intermediary, the network provider.  Impression "inventory" is stochastic, since audience sizes are unknown in advance.  Therefore, the network provider has a complex inventory management problem in deciding which ads to display when and to whom.  We study this allocation problem using models that illuminate managerial insights and provide algorithms for practical implementation. 

My advisors are Sridhar Tayur and Alan Scheller-Wolf.

My expected graduation date is May 2010. I am on the academic job market: Please download my Curriculum Vitae, Research Statement, and Teaching Statement.

Before starting my PhD, I completed an Honours Bachelor of Mathematics in Operations Research Co-op from the University of Waterloo, Canada, with a minor in Computer Science.  At internships, I worked as a mainframe programmer in an insurance company, a quantitative analyst at a mutual fund firm, and an operations analyst at a national distribution center of a large retail merchandiser.