About Us

Arvind Rangaswamy Co-Founder and President

Arvind Rangaswamy (PhD, Northwestern University) is University Distinguished Professor of Marketing at The Smeal College of Business at Penn State. From 2009 to 2012, he was the Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty. Before joining Penn State, he was a faculty member at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).

His research is focused on methods and models to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing using information technologies. He has published numerous professional articles on marketing analytics and digital marketing in top academic journals and is among the world’s leading scholars in these areas. He co-authored a widely used textbook on Marketing Analytics titled, Marketing Engineering. He is a Principal and co-founder of DecisionPro, Inc (www.decisionpro.biz, www.enginius.biz), and has consulted for many leading companies including Abbott Labs, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and SAP among others. He is a past Editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (2020-2024). He also served as the Research Director of the eBusiness Research Center at Penn State (1999-2007).

His academic honors include Government of India Scholar Award, IC2 Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Robert B. Clarke Outstanding Educator Award, Thinkers50 India, and IBM Faculty Partner. In addition, he is a two-time recipient of The Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp Award for Long-Term Impact given by the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Wenlan Yu Co-Founder

Wenlan Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Penn State, specializing in developing automated methods for customer discovery and product innovation. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, she worked as a product manager at Sohu.com, a leading Chinese internet company listed on NASDAQ, where she managed the homepage for both PC and mobile platforms, serving 300 million daily active users. Her professional experience also includes internships at the Financial Times and Bloomberg Businessweek China, where she covered the high-tech and internet industries in China. Wenlan holds dual bachelor's degrees from Peking University and a master's degree from the University of Hong Kong.

Ning Zhong Co-Founder

Ning Zhong is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University. He has a PhD in Marketing from Emory University (2019). MS in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (2011), MS in Management Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2008), and BS in Measurement Control Technology and Instruments, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2005).

Dr. Zhong's research primarily focuses on social media analytics, text analytics, and location analytics using machine learning techniques and Bayesian statistics to address various topics in marketing, such as understanding shifts in consumer preferences, idea generation, personalized marketing, and competitive market structure analysis, among other topics.