I am an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at the Decision, Risk, and Operations Division of the Columbia Business School. I am also Director of the Columbia Business Analytics Initiative, a joint initiative of the DRO Division at the Business School and the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department in the School of Engineering.

My book (Python for MBAs) is ready for order! Check it out if you've always wanted to harness the power of coding in your work but haven't been quite sure where to start. Supplementary materials and instructor resources will be available on the book's website. See also the table of contents and sample pages.

My time is primarily spent

• Designing and teaching a broad range of analytics classes aimed at students in the MBA, Executive MBA, and Masters of Engineering programs at Columbia, as well as executive education seminars at Columbia and for private companies. In addition to on-campus classes, my work includes Columbia Engineering's EdX class on Demand and Supply Analytics and Columbia Business School's online class Python for Managers. I am also the author of XLKitLearn, a tool designed to bridge Excel and Python in the context of data science.
• Researching the ways companies can harness the power of data and analytics to drive value. I write case studies with companies around applications of analytics and data science to specific business problems, and more broadly around management issues in a data-driven world. On the more technical side, I study the application of Markov Decision Process to large, complex inventory fulfillment problems with many locations and items that compete for resources.
• Acting as the Director of the Business Analytics Initiative where I work on the the design of the analytics curriculum at Columbia, and coordinate and run a number of analytic extra-curricular talks and activities, including a series of talks featuring academics from around Columbia as well as practitioners from industry.

(Short) Background

I was born in France and moved to England when I was 9. My undergraduate degree was in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and MIT through the (now defunct and much missed) Cambridge MIT Exchange program which allowed me to spend a third of my degree at MIT. I then completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, followed by a PhD in Operations Research at Columbia (with a research internship at Amazon.com) under the supervisions of Profs Awi Federgruen and Garud Iyengar (with whom I still work). I then spent a little under three years as a Deployed Computational Engineer (translation: Data Scientist and Engagement Manager) at Palantir Technologies where I worked on the commercial side of the business in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals, to finance, to legal services. I rejoined Columbia in the Spring of 2018.

My first name is Charles. My middle name is Raphael. My second middle name - which I go by - is Daniel. Go figure...