Research

The primary research scope of the Leir Research Institute can be categorized into three thrusts:

 

Corporate Sustainability and Resiliency —This area includes modeling and simulation of environmental carrying capacity dynamics related to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts with corporate operational modeling; advanced data-driven analytic, systems analysis, simulation and autonomous intelligence techniques to analyze and predict disruptive events, vulnerabilities, and consequences; implementation and management of mitigation strategies across the enterprise to reduce corporate risk and exposure, increasing agility, velocity, and resiliency across supply chain operations and enterprise risk management; urban ecology studies with alternative renewable energy scenarios; quantitative finance and financial disruption propagation across domains and ecosystems including environmental economics of climate change; ethically-responsible organizational behavior and management principles; and, corporate sustainability and resiliency metrics to quantify and establish absolute metrics for operations management.

Connected Society and Wellbeing — This research is centered around people. It includes customer-focused business continuity with digital marketing and customer resource management.  It includes studies on healthcare and wellbeing from a broad spectrum, such as predictive modeling, precision medicine, clinic decision support, patient engagements, IoT and telemedicine, healthcare delivery, analysis of social, economic and environmental impact to healthcare, modeling of socio-behavioral and cognitive processes related to healthcare.  This research also includes smart city, public safety and security, and the innovation acceleration research relates to strategic management, novel marketing and investor strategies, and business incubation of IoT-based products and services.

Business Data Science —The primary focus of this thrust area involves application research related to advanced machine learning constructs and autonomous intelligence, data analytics, and business data visualization techniques to improve business performance and resiliency; enhance enterprise data visibility using cloud-based platforms and securely accessing heterogeneous data sources; real-time data analytics for IoT cyber-physical systems and network security analysis; and, business intelligence and knowledge management systems to share information, visualize solutions, and manage activities that improve agility and velocity across the global business network. 

 

Recent Research Spotlights

Read more by clicking on each faculty member's name.

Dantong Yu

  • Business Data Science: Using Graph Neural Network to process spatial-temporal data from the global climate model, power grid, traffic prediction, and distributed sensors
  • Complex Network Models for Asset pricing and Financial Decision Making: FinTech Via A Network Len
  • Heterogenous Network Analysis: Multiple networks (causality, supply-chain, co-investment, and board member networks) exist among firms and provide a rich set of contexts for detecting global and local trends.

Ming Taylor (Fang)

  • How does the top executive social networks influence firms’ financial reporting?
  • Applying machine learning techniques to asset pricing factor models to improve predictive performance.
  • Do social networks gain trust from investors and help firms with issuing financial securities?
  • A new lens into market responses to earnings announcements.
  • Do socially connected firms evade more taxes?

Shanthi Gopalakrishnan

  • How does the Covid-19 pandemic impact Innovation in industries? Crisis and Innovation
  • Does exposure to a crisis make organizations more resilient? 
  • How Identifying with the organization allows individuals to stay in control and stay grounded during a Crisis
  • How can firms improve their R&D skills through strategic alliances?

Jim Shi

  • Healthcare Operations Management
  • Logistics and Container Transportation Network Optimization
  • Green Supply Chain and Sustainable Plastic Management
  • Blockchain applications on a supply chain management
  • Agricultural Supply Chain to help Small-scale farmers survive and thrive
  • Talent Crowdsourcing of Platform Economics

Jasmine Chang

  • Blockchain applications on supply chain management: What type of business is the most beneficial to blockchain technology? When is the best timing for a business to adopt blockchain technology? How would implementation of blockchain technology affect pricing and inventory management decisions?
  • Healthcare management strategies: How to develop an effective hospital referral scheme to allocate limited medical resources within a hierarchical healthcare system? How to optimize scheduling and resource allocation among departments in a hospital?
  • Physicians’ information management on online healthcare communities: What kind of information is essential for patients to select physicians? How would physicians’ online pictures affect patients’ selection decisions? 
  • Dynamics of outward FDI and productivity spillovers in logistics services industry: How outward foreign direct investment affects its domestic business ecosystem? An example of Chinese logistics service industry.

Jorge E. Fresneda

  • Role of information in online consumer reviews and social media as influencing consumer decision-making
  • Development and application of new methodologies to analyze unstructured data 
  • Impact of the lack of accessibility of websites for disabled consumers
  • Marketing with the goal of creating a more inclusive marketplace

Raja Roy

  • Disruptive technological changes
  • Evolution of entrepreneurial opportunities and innovative new technologies in high-tech industries
  • Firm-level capabilities that help both established firms and entrepreneurial new ventures navigate technological changes

Haisu Zhang

  • Converting scientific research into marketable products is challenging. 
  • Valley of Death is a term used to describe a gap between creation of scientific knowledge and commercial development of new products.
  • In order to overcome Valley of Death, firms need to build their ability to apply basic research findings to new product development. 
  • When the structure of a product is highly complex, firms are more motivated to build this ability. 
  • While using such an ability appropriately can help overcome Valley of Death, using it excessively may prevent firms from developing radically new products (i.e., products that are substantially different from existing ones in the market).