New Carey faculty for the 2024-25 year

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s new faculty for the 2024-25 academic year all have one thing in common: they’re excited to join a group of passionate researchers doing ground-breaking, important work. But their experiences, expertise, and backgrounds are diverse. 

Meet five of our new faculty. Can you guess which one has pi memorized to 36 digits, which has their photo in the College Football Hall of Fame, or which one is a runner? How about which one of these is a Seinfeld fan? And whose favorite food is a Chinese cuisine called “rolling donkey?”

Leann Thayaparan (Assistant Professor, Operations Management and Business Analytics) conducts research focused on the intersection of operations management, optimization, and machine learning in the area of sustainability. By developing new algorithms for practice, she advances knowledge of how machine learning can be used for social good.

Q: Do you have a favorite quote or saying? What do you like about it?
A: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” It reminds me how lucky I am for the community and support I’ve had around me, which has allowed me to pursue topics I love.

Q: What else would you like to share about yourself?
A: I’m very passionate about equity, accessibility, and inclusion. My main goal through my teaching, my research, and my career is to help make the world we live in just a little bit more fair.

Kurt Sweat (Postdoctoral Fellow) is affiliated with the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative. His fields of research are market design, health economics, structural econometrics, and industrial organization. His research employs econometric models grounded in economic theory to study market design in health care settings. His recent research has focused on the design of the heart transplant waitlist in the United States.

Q: What excites you about being at Carey Business School?
A: Being in such an interdisciplinary environment that is at the forefront of research in the business of health and health policy.

Q: What inspired you to pursue this field?
A: I was brought into studying transplantation thanks to a cardiologist deciding to chat with me at a coffee shop about some of the problems facing the heart transplant allocation system. Once I realized how many interesting problems there are to work on, where I can make use of my quantitative skills, it was hard to resist!

Weiguang Wang (Assistant Professor, Information Systems) conducts research focused on the algorithmic development, business application, and engineering implementation of AI, specifically in the context of health care. Before joining Carey, he was an assistant professor at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

Q: What’s your best piece of advice for graduate students?
A: Do interesting things.

Q: What inspired you to pursue this field?
A: I've always been interested in bridging advanced technologies and business practices, especially in health care. I started programming for deep learning in 2015.

David Tan (Research Professor, Management and Organization) specializes in the impact of business on public health, nonmarket strategy, labor markets, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation. He serves as a senior editor at Organization Science and was named one of the “Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors” by Poets & Quants in 2023.

Q: What is the most interesting thing about you?
A: I was 19 when I started my PhD.

Q: What excites you about being at Carey Business School?
A: I’m excited about the opportunity to be a part of a school with a distinctive identity. I am excited about opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of business and public health.

Nicholas Tilipman (Assistant Professor, Economics and Health) is focused on the intersection of health care economics and industrial organization, particularly the effects of competition and regulation on the behavior of employers, insurers, and providers. Prior to coming to Carey, he was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and served as a staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisors.

Q: What inspired you to pursue this field?
A: I've been interested in economics since I was an undergrad, but I really wanted to be an international trade economist. Prior to getting my PhD, I took a job as a full-time research assistant for a health economist at Columbia University. This was prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, so prior to the huge surge of interest in health-related topics. As such, I was worried it would be boring. Instead, I ended up falling in love with it, totally abandoned my interest in international economics, and I have been focusing on health care ever since! That was almost 20 years ago!

Q: What is your favorite meal?
A: Easy! Pizza from Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut.

Answers:

• Pi memorized to 36 digits—Nicholas Tilipman.
• Photo in the College Football Hall of Fame—Leann Thayaparan.
• Runner—David Tan.
• Seinfeld fan—Kurt Sweat.
• Favorite food is “rolling donkey”—Weiguang Wang.