Faculty & Instructors
Learn from leading faculty and industry experts who bring real-world experience into the classroom. Our instructors combine deep academic knowledge with practical insights from across the analytics, business, and tech-sectors — helping you build skills that are relevant, current, and career-ready.
Faculty and instructors subject to change.
Frequent Insights from Industry Leaders
Throughout the program, you’ll hear directly from industry experts who are leading the way in data and analytics. These guest presentations offer real-world insight into how analytics is applied across sectors—from tech and finance to healthcare and consulting—giving you a clearer view of where your skills can take you.
Technical Expertise
Dr. Ceren Kolsarici is a Director (Scotiabank Centre for Analytics & AI, Associate Professor & Ian R. Friendly Fellow of Marketing at Smith School of Business.
Dr. Kolsarici specializes in Big Data and analytics applications on domains including advertising, mobile and digital marketing, diffusion of new products, pharmaceuticals and financial sector. Her current projects focus on design and evaluation of integrated marketing communications campaigns, media selection and scheduling, budgeting and development of advertising creative strategies. She develops new models and methods to improve managerial decisions and marketing applications in practice, by helping managers better understand how marketing affects firm performance and designing marketing programs that maximize profitability. Dr. Kolsarici's research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. She has been invited to present her work at institutions such as UC Davis, Northwestern University, Erasmus University, Tilburg University, Koc University as well as national and international conferences in Australia, Belgium, US, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and Turkey.
Ceren has received several awards and grants for her scholarly contributions including the QSB New Researcher Achievement Award, MSI's Top Young Scholar Nomination, SSHRC, FQRSC and other external funds, American Marketing Association-Sheth Consortium Fellowship, as well as nominations for national (SSHRC) and provincial (ADESAQ) doctoral dissertation awards. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing (2009) from McGill University a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering (2002) from Middle East Technical University, and an MBA (2004) from Bilkent University. Dr. Kolsarici teaches Advertising, Social Media and Marketing Analytics in Commerce, MBA, MMA and Ph.D. programs. She also continues to do consulting and executive training for various companies in Canada and internationally.
Murray Lei is an Assistant Professor of Management Analytics and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Smith School of Business, Queen's University. His research focuses on developing data-driven frameworks that enable companies to make dynamic decisions under uncertainty. Additionally, he investigates how data-driven analytics can be aligned with societal values, particularly in the areas of privacy, fairness, and sustainability.
Murray’s research has been published in top-tier peer-reviewed academic journals and is supported by various funding agencies. His achievements have been recognized through multiple awards, including the New Researcher Achievement Award. He has collaborated with leading global tech companies such as Alibaba, Instacart, Flipkart, Staples, and Oracle Retail Labs, where he has contributed to developing real-time, large-scale analytics solutions.
Murray’s teaching interests span Business Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Operations Management, Supply Chain Management, and Revenue Management. He has extensive experience teaching these subjects across various academic levels, including professional graduate programs (such as Master's in Management Analytics), research-based graduate programs (M.Sc. and Ph.D.), and undergraduate courses.
Yuri Levin is a Professor of Management Analytics at Smith School of Business. Previously, he was Rector (Dean) of Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, Stephen J.R. Smith Chair of Analytics, Executive Director of Analytics and AI, and the founding Director of the Scotiabank Centre for Customer Analytics at Smith School of Business. He was also a founding Director of Smith's Master of Management Analytics program.
In 2016, he was named by Poets and Quants as one of the Top 40 Professors Under 40 Worldwide. He teaches analytical decision making, strategic analytics, and pricing analytics courses in MBA, MMA, and Executive Education programmes. He holds a PhD in Operations Research from Rutgers University in the US where he taught in different MBA programmes for 3 years before joining Queen's in 2002.
Yuri was the 2013 and 2014 recipient of the MBA Professor of the Year Award and the 2014 and 2015 recipient of the Master of Management Analytics Professor of the Year Award. He has developed innovative approaches and published widely in the general area of revenue management and dynamic pricing. He was a co-winner of 2013 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Practice Prize for pricing and promotions analysis at Molson Coors Brewing Company and a co-winner of 2009 INFORMS COIN-OR Cup for applications of COIN-OR technologies in development of novel techniques for cargo capacity management and dynamic pricing. He was also the 2010 recipient of Queen's School of Business Award for Research Achievement and 2003 New Researcher Achievement Award.
Yuri is an Associate Editor of Operations Research. He served as Chair of INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing section, Associate Editor of Management Science, and was a Guest Editor of the special issue of European Journal of Operational Research on Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing. Yuri's research has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada. Yuri has consulted widely on consumer behavior modeling and optimization of pricing and developed corporate training programmes in strategic analytics, analytical decision making, and strategic pricing optimization. Clients include: Scotiabank, TD Bank, Loblaws, LoyaltyOne, Fox News, Rio Tinto, McDonalds, Molson.
Guang Li’s research interest focuses on modeling customer choice behavior, as well as seeking solutions to high-impact operations management problems, such as assortment planning and price optimization, using both analytical and data-driven approaches. She is also interested in topics at the interface of operations and marketing, including the impact of new pricing, promotion mechanisms and personalized marketing, on operational decisions. Guang’s work has appeared in Operations Research and Operations Research Letters.
Dr. Nediak has undergraduate and M.Sc. degrees from the Department of Management and Applied Mathematics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. He has received his PhD in Operations Research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Alex Scott has a background in management consulting with a specialization in retail banking analytics. In addition to teaching in Smith’s Master of Management Analytics programs, he is currently a manager at TD Bank in enterprise data & analytics where he leads analytics projects and sets analytics strategy across Canada and the United States. Alex holds two degrees from Smith School of Business at Queen’s University – a Bachelor of Commerce and a Master of Management Analytics.
Wulin Suo joined the school in 2000. Before joining the school, he had taught at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the Mathematics Department of UBC and Hebei University in China. He also worked in the risk management department and the treasury department of the Royal Bank of Canada.
Suo’s research interests include consumption and portfolio theory, asset pricing, valuation and hedging of derivative securities, term structure modeling, credit risk and risk management. His research interests also include computational finance, and mathematical finance.
He has a PhD in Applied Mathematics (UBC '94) and a PhD in Finance (Toronto ;02).
With a unique ability to present technical topics in an easy-to-understand and inspiring way, Steve is a sought-after professor and AI expert at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business. He leads both introductory and expert-level courses on multiple aspects of AI in undergraduate, graduate and executive education programs. He has been selected by students in the Master of Management Analytics as MMA Professor of the Year for the last three years running.
Holding PhD, MSc, and BSc degrees in Computer Science, Steve’s research focuses on analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing. His work has been published in leading journals including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, and others. In recognition of his work in the analytics and AI space, he was awarded a prestigious Scotiabank Scholar research grant.
Beyond teaching and research, Steve has run a big data startup company and conducted industrial operations research at Raytheon, a major U.S. defense contractor and commercial electronics company. He regularly consults with a wide range of organizations on the application of AI for best business outcomes.
Jue Wang is an Associate Professor & Distinguished Research Fellow of Management Analytics at Smith School of Business. His research lies at the intersection of operations research and statistics, with particular interests in real-time decisions with monitoring data. In addition, he is studying complex revenue management problems through the lens of optimal control theory. Jue has led multiple big data & analytics consulting projects in energy, transportation, and mining industries. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University (China) in 2007 and PhD from the University of Toronto in 2013.
Nasrin Yousefi is an Assistant Professor in Management Analytics at Smith School of Business, Queen's University. Nasrin received her Ph.D. in Operations Research in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto and her research interests are data-driven optimization and decision-making under uncertainty with applications in healthcare operations management.
Management Expertise
Barry Cross is an award-winning professor and speaker, and an expert in operations strategy. He joined Smith School of Business in 2006 after nearly 20 years in leadership and executive roles in a global industry career./p>
Today, Barry speaks widely in the areas of Productivity, Innovation, Strategy, and Execution, helping organizations and leaders be their best. He is the bestselling author of three books, dozens of journal articles and case studies.
Diana Drury is the Director of Team & Executive Coaching at Smith School of Business. She is an experienced Team Performance Coach, Counsellor, College Professor and Facilitator. Diana is responsible for the overall leadership of the team and executive coaching programs which operate across eight of the Smith School of Business MBA and Master’s programs and Queen’s Executive Education. She also works extensively with outside organizations. She has over 30 years’ experience working with high performing teams as an Administrator, Athletic Director, Coach and as an athlete at the College, University, Provincial and National levels. She has been the recipient of numerous coaching awards. She also competes as an athlete nationally representing Canada at the World Masters Games. To date, Diana has been inducted into seven Halls of Fames across Canada as an Athlete, Builder and Coach.
She completed her PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on process management within innovative organizations at University of Ljubljana (2010). Prior to joining Smith School of Business, Dr. Fain was a lecturer at Strathclyde Business School (UK), where she taught Managing Innovation, Strategic Global Marketing and Integrated Marketing Communications.
She has extensive consulting experience within the field of product development and innovation management with a wide diversity of firms (including oil and gas, manufacturing and retail). Her research interests are two-fold. She is exploring implementation of open innovation practices into mature organizations and looking into pedagogies that support the development of entrepreneurial mindsets in design students.
At Smith School of Business, Dr. Fain teaches entrepreneurship and new venture creation courses in the Commerce program and supports the delivery of content for the individual projects on the Master of Management Innovation and Entrepreneurship program.
Dr. Tracy Jenkin is an Associate Professor at Smith School of Business, affiliate member of Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Her current research explores human-AI collaboration and cognitive processes. She has also published in the areas of data analytics, environmental sustainability and IT (green IT), project management, and project alignment. She has published in a variety of top journals including Business and Society, The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Information and Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Information Technology, and MIS Quarterly. Dr. Jenkin’s teaching focuses on analytics, artificial intelligence, and agile project management.
Dr. Jenkin received her PhD in Management (MIS), with a minor in Computer Science, from Queen’s University. She previously worked in the IT and software industry for ten years, working with a broad range of organizations, such as Accenture, Dell and new venture Trilogy Software, and across a diverse set of industries, including telecom, high-tech, financial services, and commodity chemicals.
Greg Libitz is an award-winning faculty member at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business, where he teaches strategy, marketing and management.
Greg is champion of co-curricular activities at Smith, and an active case writer.
Outside of Smith, he is a principal in a boutique consulting firm with a focus on strategy, marketing and management development.
He resides with his family in Kingston.
Elspeth Murray has served as the Associate Dean - MBA and Master’s Programs from 2012-2022 and has been a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Smith School of Business since 1996. She also holds the CIBC Fellowship in Entrepreneurship, and founded Smith's Centre for Business Venturing. She is the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Social Impact. Prior to joining Smith, she worked in industry for 7 years for several firms including IBM, and Canadian Tire. As an integral part of her work in the strategy and new venture fields, Dr. Murray specializes in the management of change. In 2002, she co-authored a best-selling book, Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 Days, Oxford University Press, with Dr. Peter Richardson. She has recently co-developed (with Dr. David Saunders) the Analytics Climate Assessment Tool (ACAT), which is used to assess organizations technological capacity, skill sets, and analytics culture. Current research is focused on best practices in leading and managing change to create an analytics culture.
Dr. Murray teaches on many MBA and Executive Education programs, and consults widely with a diversity of firms including BMW, Detour Gold, Wawanesa Insurance, Versacold Logistics and the Auditor General for Canada. She serves as a Director for several firms and is an advisor to several start-ups and CEO's. Dr. Murray received an undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics, and an MBA, both from Queen's University. Her doctorate in Strategy and Management Information Systems was completed at the Richard Ivey School of Business.
Geoff Pond has been a member of RMC’s Department of Management since July, 2015 and taught an adjunct basis at both Queen's University (Smith School of Business and Engineering & Applied Science) and uOttawa (Telfer School of Business) since 2016.
Prior to joining academia, Dr. Pond spent 7 years as a member of Defence Research and Development Canada as an analyst with the Centre for Operations Research and Analysis. He has been a member of NATO and ABCA research panels, authored a number of government reports, and presented research at a number of national and international conferences.
His research is focused on optimization of resources, specifically in support of fleet management. His PhD in mechanical engineering was awarded by the University of New Brunswick in 2006. Dr. Pond also holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration awarded by Queen's University.
Keith Rogers has a Ph.D. in Management from Queen's as well as an M.A.Sc in Management Sciences (Supply Chain Management) from the University of Waterloo and an M.A. in Economics (Econometrics and International Economics) from Queen's. He has published research in the journal of Operations Management, Development Economics and the Journal of Business Ethics.