Skip to main content

Katherine Milkman:  Evan C Thompson Professor

Katherine Milkman

Katherine Milkman

Provost Wendell Pritchett and Vice Provost for Education Beth Winkelstein announced the appointment of Katherine L. Milkman to the Evan C Thompson Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching, effective July 1. 

Dr. Milkman is associate professor of operations, information and decisions in the Wharton School and co-director of Wharton People Analytics. Her research uses big data methodologies primarily to study how people systematically deviate from making optimal choices and how to improve decision-making in such areas as diet, exercise and saving for retirement. She has also used data approaches to study race and gender discrimination, what kind of stories are published in The New Yorker, and what makes science and The New York Times articles widely shared.

The winner of numerous Wharton teaching awards, she has taught at Wharton since 2009, received an Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and was named one of the world’s leading business school professors under 40 by Poets and Quants. Her work has been widely cited in such media as The New York Times, Forbes, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review and National Public Radio and published in such leading academic journals as Management Science, The Journal of Finance and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

She earned a PhD in 2009 from Harvard in computer science and business and a BSE summa cum laude in 2004 in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton.

Evan C Thompson, W’64, endowed the Thompson Professorship in 2003 to recognize teaching excellence. Previous Evan C Thompson Professors include Peter Struck, now professor of classical studies in SAS; Daniel Lee, now UPS Foundation Professor in SEAS; and Dennis DeTurck, now Fox Leadership Professor and professor of mathematics in SAS.

Back to Top