Global Unicorn Program - New York City

Dr. Xiang is a leading authority on China business. His insights on the innovations in China, globalization of Chinese companies, China’s development models, global implications of China’s transformation and economic disruption have been widely acclaimed. He serves as an independent board member of several companies (including three Fortune Global 500 companies) listed in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the United States.

Dr. Xiang’s research interests include the reform of state-owned enterprises, innovation, and the role of the private sector in China, and economic disruptions. He is a leading authority on China business, innovations in China, globalization of Chinese companies, China’s development models, global implications of China’s transformation, social innovation, economic disruptions, China-US relations, global trade and investment systems and global governance. His writings and cases on these subjects are considered among the most influential in China and beyond.

Dr. Hong Chen is Professor of Management Science at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB). He is one of the founding faculty members of CKGSB and the director of the Clean Energy and Carbon Neutral Development Research Center. Prior to joining CKGSB, he held the positions of Alumni Professor of Supply Chain Management at the University of British Colombia Sauder School of Business, and Professor of Management Science at Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. In recent years, his research has focused on clean energy and carbon neutral development, particularly in the fields of investment, technology, and market opportunities in the entire hydrogen value chain. Dr. Hong Chen received his PhD from Stanford University

Tianshu's research is focused on digital transformation, digital technology, digital platform, and digital economy. His research conducted in collaboration with leading private and public sector organizations addresses how firms and governments can combine data analytics, field experiment, causal inference, machine learning, and economic models to improve business decisions and industry policies.

Tianshu has worked closely with a variety of organizations including Facebook, Alibaba, and Adobe. Many findings from these studies have been implemented by collaborating organizations. Tianshu has given over 80 talks at top universities (Harvard, MIT, Wharton, Chicago, CMU, NYU, etc.) and international conferences, and has over a dozen research papers published in top journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, QME and Journal of Health Economics. Tianshu’s research has received 16 Best Paper Awards (ICIS, CIST, WITS, INFORMS), and served as the Associate Editors at ISR, Management Science and MISQ. Tianshu has developed a series of new courses on Digital Transformation, Big Data Analytics, and Digital Platforms and was honored with USC Golden Apple Award (for Best Professors).

Dr. Liao has an extensive global career with 25 years of experience in strategy and leadership roles in both academia and industry. In addition to his role at CKGSB, Dr. Liao serves as Senior Advisor to the Chairman at JD Group and an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School. He served as Chief Strategy Officer of JD.com from April 2017 to July 2021, and played a key role in reshaping JD's mission and strategic positioning, pivoting it into a technology and service enterprise with a central focus on the supply chain. He also spearheaded key investments in companies like VIPS, Google, Farfetch, Li & Fung, FiveStar (formerly Best Buy of China).

Dr. Liao is well-known for his cross-disciplinary research in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. His academic experience extends across the United States and Asia, including tenured professorships at the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology and visiting professorship positions at institutions such as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, and China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).

He has also served on the boards of several companies, including Farfetch, Qihoo 360, China Merchant Real Estate, China Unicom, and Yonghui, Bairong. Dr. Liao is frequently invited to advise leading Chinese companies and MNCs on building innovative organizations and designing strategic initiatives for sustainable growth. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is regularly quoted in business publications worldwide.

Garud Iyengar’s research is focused on understanding uncertain systems and exploiting available information using data- driven control and optimization algorithms. He and his students have explored applications in many diverse fields, such as machine learning, systemic risk, asset management, operations management, sports analytics, and biology. Iyengar’s research group is currently working on thermodynamics of sensing and memory in cells, an automatic defensive assignment and event detection in NBA games, a deep neural-network-based framework for interpretable robust decision making, attribution schemes for allocating payment in a multi-channel advertising, systemic risk associated with extreme weather, and an NLP-based model for predicting stock performance using news reports. Iyengar received a B Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1993 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. He is a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute.

Sheena S. Iyengar is a renowned authority on choice and decision-making, Her influential book "The Art of Choosing" Choosing" received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. She has made notable appearances on television, including the Today Show, the Daily Show, and Fareed Zakaria's GPS, and her TED Talks have garnered nearly four million views. Dr. Iyengar holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University.

She has earned numerous accolades, including the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002 and being named a member of the Thinkers50 in 2011 and 2019. Dr. Iyengar is a respected educator, having received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School in 2012 and recognition as one of the World’s Best B-School Professors by Poets and Quants. She has shared her expertise with leading organizations like Deloitte, Google, and J.P. Morgan & Chase. In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Iyengar is known for her "Think Bigger" course, which combines neuroscience and cognitive science to unlock creative potential. She is also the leader of the Innovation Salon, facilitating discussions on industry challenges and innovative solutions among students, alumni, faculty, and Innovation Fellows.

Zhou Yu designs algorithms for real-time intelligent interactive systems that coordinate with user actions that are beyond spoken languages, including non-verbal behaviors to achieve effective and natural communications. In particular, she optimizes human-machine communication via studies of multimodal sensing and analysis, speech and natural language processing, machine learning and human-computer interaction. The central focus of her research is to bring together all the areas above to design, implement and deploy end-to-end real-time interactive intelligent systems that can plan globally considering interaction history and current user actions to achieve better user experience and task performance. She enjoys collaborating with researchers with different backgrounds on interdisciplinary research in all areas of science, such as healthcare, education, and robotics. Yu joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in Jan 2021. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at UC Davis. She received her PhD at the Language Technologies Institute at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2017.

Prof. Harry West Professor West is a professional practice in the department of industrial engineering and operation research. He's the driving force behind Columbia's innovative curriculum, focusing on design, data, and behavior change to reduce consumption. As the Principal of Invisible Design, he tackles complex business challenges and guides organizations to align their design work with strategic goals. Harry's impressive background includes being the former CEO of frog, Senior Partner at Prophet, and CEO at Continuum. He's had a hand in creating groundbreaking products like Swiffer and ThermaCare for P&G and reimagining interactions in financial services with BBVA and Fidelity. His extensive global experience spans numerous companies, from American Express to BMW, with a track record of billion-dollar product and service designs. Before his design consulting career, he taught engineering at MIT, holding a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution, and holds a deep academic background with degrees from Cambridge University and MIT.

His research focuses on quantitative behavioral finance models that incorporate human emotions and psychology into financial decision making, and on intelligent wealth management solutions using optimal control and machine learning techniques. Zhou is well known for his work in indefinite stochastic LQ control theory and application to dynamic mean-variance portfolio selection, in asset allocation and pricing under cumulative prospect theory, and in general time inconsistent problems. He directs the FDT Center for Intelligent Asset Management, a research center funded by a FinTech company. He has addressed the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians and has been awarded the Wolfson Research Award from The Royal Society (UK), the Outstanding Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Humboldt Distinguished Lecturer, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. He is both an IEEE Fellow and a SIAM Fellow. Zhou received his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Control Theory from Fudan University in China in 1989. He was the Nomura Professor of Mathematical Finance and the Director of Nomura Center for Mathematical Finance at University of Oxford during 2007-2016 before joining Columbia.