Mack Innovation
Doctoral Association

The Mack Innovation Doctoral Association (MIDAS) is a student-run cross-departmental organization of Wharton PhD students interested in research topics related to innovation, including technology strategy, financing and organizing of innovation, entrepreneurship, and digitization. Its main activities include a seminar series for in-progress student research and the Wharton Innovation Doctoral Symposium (WINDS), a multi-disciplinary doctoral conference that takes place annually.

The MIDAS seminar series offers an informal and stimulating environment for students to propose new research ideas, discuss preliminary work, highlight new data sources, receive suggestions from peers, and circulate helpful information. Industry-academic seminars and workshops connect theory to practice and allow members to watch current innovation challenges play out.

Participation in MIDAS is primarily for Wharton doctoral and postdoctoral students. If you do not meet these criteria but would like to join, please contact the organizers below.

MIDAS is a collaboration between Wharton PhD students, the Mack Institute, and Wharton Doctoral Programs. The seminar was started by two PhD students, Andrea Contigiani (Management) and Kyle Myers (Healthcare), in the spring of 2015.

Seminar Topics

  • Innovation and technology strategy
  • Financing of innovation
  • Organization of innovation
  • Innovation and science policy
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Economics of digitization

How to Join

To sign up, please email the organizers at board-innovation-group@wharton.upenn.edu.

Board 2024–2025

Board Members

Headshot of a person with wavy, shoulder-length hair, wearing a sleeveless blue top, smiling against a plain background.

Zorina Chen

Zorina Chen is a Ph.D. student in Management, studying careers and labor markets. She is particularly interested in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, as well as the connections between organizational design, strategic human capital, and firm performance outcomes such as innovation. Zorina earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, where she majored in Sociology and Political Science.
Person outdoors wearing a gray zip-up fleece jacket with crossed arms, smiling, with a brick building and glass entrance in the background.

Ruben Ramirez Salas

Ruben is a 2nd year PhD student in Information Systems at The Wharton School. His research centers on artificial creativity and the role of AI judgment in applications within creative industries, with the goal of advancing insights into the economics of AI, including its implications for labor and organizational decision-making. He experiments with large language models (LLMs) to explore AI's broader impact on work and productivity. Previously, he completed a degree in Computer Science and an MBA.
Headshot of a person wearing glasses and a tie, smiling with a blurred outdoor background.

Vishrut Rana

Vishrut is a third-year PhD student in Operations Management at The Wharton School. His research focuses on emerging topics in clean energy, with a particular interest in addressing how to best integrate new technologies in existing energy systems to mitigate the impacts of climate change. He studies the geographically varying impacts of clean energy investments to identify optimal development strategies and explores business model and technology innovations that improve developer returns. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked at Tesla Energy and EDF Renewables and graduated from UC Berkeley with a BS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
A headshot of a person wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie, smiling against a plain background.

Fernando Stein

Fernando is a second-year Ph.D. student in Finance, specializing in asset pricing and innovation. His research examines how financial markets respond to innovation, particularly around the announcement and release of new products. Before starting his doctoral studies, Fernando worked at Bank of America, focusing on FX and fixed income strategy in emerging markets. He earned both a bachelor's degree in Economics and Applied Mathematics and a master's degree in Economic Theory from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).
A person in a headshot wearing a grey suit and white shirt, smiling against a blurred indoor background.

Vinay Subramanian

Vinay is a 3rd year doctoral student in Management. His research interests are in entrepreneurial strategy, venture capital and innovation. Prior to academia, Vinay was a Managing Director at multiple PE and VC funds, investment banker at Goldman Sachs NY, led M&A at Flipkart and held board roles at unicorn startups. Vinay has degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan).
A headshot of a person wearing a grey sweater over a light blue collared shirt and tie, set against a plain grey background.

Ndubuisi (Richard) Ugwuanyi

Richard is a doctoral student in management and specializes in entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and strategy. His current work examines how resources shape entrepreneurial experimentation, an important cornerstone of innovation-driven enterprises. His work relies on large archival datasets, applied econometrics and deep learning - especially large language models - to generate behavioral insights about startups. Prior to academia, he worked in the cosmetics development and manufacturing industry and at the National Research Council, both in Canada. He received his BSc in Industrial Chemistry (specialization in Industrial Chemical Technology), MASc in Chemical Engineering and MS in Management (Strategy, Entrepreneurship & Innovation).
Headshot of a person wearing glasses and a blue suit, standing in front of a blue background with

Yangxinyu Xie

Xinyu is a 3rd-year doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School. His research focuses on the intersection of large language models with statistical insights. His recent projects include exploring watermarking techniques to enhance transparency in AI systems and creating a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models possess genuine reasoning abilities. Alongside his academic pursuits, he actively participates in data science competitions in energy and network science, earning distinctions in the CityLearn Challenge, ADRENALIN Energy Competitions, and the Science4cast Competition.

Alumni

  • Aparajita Agarwal
  • Sarath Balachandran
  • Jiayi Bao
  • Aymeric Bellon
  • Andrew Boysen
  • Logan Bryan
  • Qingqing Chen
  • Jaeho Choi
  • Andrea Contigiani
  • John Eklund
  • Charu Gupta
  • Jessica Jeffers
  • Fujie Jin
  • Jaeho Kim
  • Karren Knowlton
  • Hideto Koizumi
  • Jessica Kim-Gina
  • Henrique Laurino Dos Santos
  • Jason Lee
  • Tong Liu
  • Bowen Lou
  • Xinyu Ma
  • Mauricio Medeiros Junior
  • Brittany Mallory
  • Alex Miller
  • Kyle R. Myers
  • Tanya Paul
  • Michael Pergler
  • Lindsay Relihan
  • Ryan Peters
  • Lisa Tang
  • Sathya Vijayakumar
  • Berry Wang
  • Sirui Wang
  • Daniel Wilde
  • Andy Wu
  • Hongyu Xiao