Team
Unnati Narang
Ruichun Liu
Masters' Students
Srinidhi Dewan
Kevin D'Souza
Ajay Pandrava
Former Students
Snehal Lokesh
Shreya Girdhar
Prafull Goel
Unnati Narang
Unnati Narang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Business Administration (Marketing) at the Gies College. Her research lies broadly in mobile and omnichannel marketing, consumer mobility, and engagement in digital environments. Her research examines how consumers’ use of mobile apps affects their behaviors in online and offline retail stores. She also studies how consumers’ movement patterns predict their retail visits and the impact of new forms of mobility (e.g., e-scooters). She uses causal modeling, econometrics, machine learning, and deep learning approaches.
Unnati's research has been published at Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Review of Marketing Research. She was awarded the 2022 AMA SIG Retail & Pricing Doctoral Student Award, the 2019 Mathew Joseph Emerging Scholar Award, the 2019 PDMA Emerging Scholar Award, the 2019 Mays Business School Outstanding Doctoral Student Award for Research, and the 2018 Shankar-Spiegel Best Dissertation Proposal Award and was the finalist for the EMAC-AiMark Doctoral Dissertation Award 2021. She received her PhD in Marketing from Mays Business School, Texas A&M University in 2020.
Ruichun Liu
Ruichun Liu is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Marketing at the Gies College of Business, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research focuses on consumer mobility, sustainability in mobility, and online education. His research methods include causal modeling, econometrics, machine learning, and deep learning.
He was awarded the 2022 Joseph E. Zwisler Fellowship, the 2020 Sheth Doctoral Fellowship, and the 2020 Stellner Research Scholarship. He earned an M.S. in Applied Economics from the University of Oklahoma, an M.S. in Applied Statistics from Shandong University, and a B.A. in Civil Engineering from the Beijing Jiaotong University.
Snehal Lokesh
Snehal Lokesh is a Graduate of UIUC's MS in Information Management with focus on Data Science at the School of Information Sciences, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before pursuing Masters, he completed his undergraduate degree from University of Pune, India and worked as Data Scientist/Consultant at Fractal Analytics, a leading firm in Artificial Intelligence and analytics.
His experience includes from diverse domains such as banking, healthcare, consumer, and retail analytics. His interests and research lie in Natural language processing, Machine learning and handling Big Data and efficiently using the data to derive meaningful insights to drive the business.
Shreya Girdhar is a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Information Management. She did her undergraduate from India in Information technology and later worked in healthcare domain as a Decision Scientist. Passionate about data and machine learning, her interest lies in user behavior analytics and customer research.
Prafull Goel is a graduate of the MS in Information Management at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is interested in digital analytics with a focus on consumer retail and social behaviour, and leveraging data to grow digital products. He’s also a passionate hiker and photographer.