Alumni Community

Ali graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: 'Key Drivers of Contractors' Mobility in the Gig Economy: A Regional Analysis'. Field: Operations Analytics.

Ali is currently employed as a data scientist at Rabobank, applying his knowledge and data analysis skills to contribute to the bank's data-driven initiatives.

See Ali's LinkedIn profile here.

Diego graduated from the program in 2021. Thesis title is: 'Is Rosie Really Riveting? Measuring occupation classification bias in the 1940 US Census.' . Field: Economics.

Diego defended his PhD thesis at the University of Utrecht in 2026. His PhD thesis is tilted: 'Microfoundations of Labor Market Inequality: Amenities, Mobility, and Firm Organization' and was supervised by Professor Anna Salomons (Utrecht University), Dr. Meike Morren (Vrije Universiteit) and Dr. Emilie Rademakers (Utrecht University).

In his research Diego combines administrative employer-employee data with surveys and modern machine learning and econometric methods to study questions about worker mobility, wage determination, and labor market inequality.

Ruben graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: Monte Carlo Tree Search-based Optimizing Agent for SPARQL Join Order Selection.

Ruben is now working as a PhD student at the Ghent University.

Justus graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: 'Modeling Score-Driven Time-Variation in Risk-Neutral Densities with an Application to Option Pricing'. Field: Quantitative Finance.

Justus is now working as a PhD student in Financial Econometrics at the School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Professor André Lucas and Dr. Anne Opschoor.

See Justus's LinkedIn profile here.

Floris graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Making Neural Networks Insensitive Towards Spurious Concepts'.  Field: Data Science.

Floris is now working as a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam.

Roger graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'To Webroom or Not: That’s the Question'. Field: Supply chain analytics.

Roger started a PhD at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and his LinkedIn page can be found here.

HyeJin graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Explaining negative responses to brand activism: Authenticity and Emotional Arousal'. Field: Marketing.

HeJin is now working as a PhD student in Marketing at Cornell University, Johnson School of Business. 

Chao graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Retrieving ESG Exclusion Level Information from ETF Methodology Books'. Field: Data Science.

Jihao graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Is vaccination the cure to the systemic risk?'. Field: Quantitative Finance.

Xiang graduated from the program in 2021. Thesis title: 'Does Limited Liability Stimulate or Stifle Innovation: Evidence from the US Bankruptcy Act of 1898.' . Field: Quantitative Finance

Xiang Li is now working as a PhD student at the Erasmus School of Economics, supervised by Professor Peter Koudijs. 

Loek graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: Improving healthcare: integrating potential task splits into home healthcare routing and scheduling.

Loek is now working as a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Dr. Markus Leitner and Professor Wout Dullaert. In his research, Loek studies logistic planning and scheduling with synchronisation and task-splitting. 

Markus graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Leakage in Adversarial Debiasing as a Consequence of a Multi-Directional Bias in Weight Space'. Field: Data Science.

Markus is now working as a PhD student at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Yuchen graduated from the program in 2021. Thesis title is: 'Multi-Polygenic Index Approach for Breast Cancer Prediction'. Field: Management Science.

Yuchen is now working as a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, supervised by Professor Philipp Koellinger.

Zhuoyu graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: Fair active learning for personalized policies.

Zhuoyu is now working as a Quantitative Marketing PhD student at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam School of Management.

See Zhuoyu's LinkedIn profile here.

Bernhard graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: 'Grouped heterogeneity in Markov-switching panel models'. Field: Data Science.

Bernhard is now working as a PhD student at the Erasmus School of Economics, under the supervision of Professor Richard Paap and Dr. Wendun Wang. In his research, Bernhard studies nonlinear dynamics, cross-sectional structures, and nonparametric techniques in panel data econometrics.

See Bernhard's personal website here.

Paul graduated from the program in 2021. Thesis title: 'Predicting Personality Scores from Parliamentary Speeches.' . Field: Management Science. 

Paul is now working as a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Professor Arjen van Witteloostuijn and Professor Svetlana Khapova. 

Paul's academic website can be found here and his LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Stephanie graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: The Association between Human Readability versus Machine Readability and Retail Investor Trading Behaviour'.

Stephanie  is now working as a PhD student at the Erasmus School of Economics. 

Caio graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: The Role of Outdegree in Seeding.

Caio is now working as a PhD student at HEC Paris.

Ana-Maria graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: 'Identification of climate disclosures in European bank reports using Large Language Models.

Ana-Maria is now working for the European Central Bank, and her LinkedIn page can be found here.

Fengtao graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: 'The Effect of Sustainable Categorization Cues on Product Consideration and Choice'.

Fengtao is now working as a PhD student at the UCL School of Management. He focuses his research on the topic quantitative marketing.

Eveline graduated from the program in 2023. Thesis title: The Impact of Short Sale Costs on Machine Learning Portfolio Allocation Models.

See Eveline's LinkedIn profile here. 

Dingli graduated from the program in 2021. Thesis title: 'Community Seeding: Utilize the Hidden Information in Network Structure.' . Field: Management Science.

Dingli is now working as a PhD student at Leuven University (Belgium).

See Dingli's LinkedIn profile here. 

Jing graduated from the program in 2022. Thesis title: 'Limited Liability and Manufacturing: Evidence from Homestead Exemption Laws in the 19th-century U.S.'. Field: Quantitative Finance.

Jing is now working as a PhD student at Swiss Finance Institute Leman campus.

Yuanyuan graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'From BERT Topic Analysis to Regression Analysis: A Study on the Relationship Between ESG Themes and Corporate Characteristics in North American and European Companies.' Field: Quantitative Finance.

Yuanyuan is now working as a PhD student in the accounting department of the Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Michael Erkens and Ying Gan. Her research interests are: ESG accounting, machine learning and natural language processing.

Ramon graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'The Effect of Air Pollution on Healthy Purchases.'

Tomas graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'Deep Imputation Networks vs. Mean Imputation in Tabular Learning with Missing Data.'

Longjaio graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'Breaking the Homophily Wall: Multicultural Experiences Reduce Nationality Homophily in Global Networks.'

Longjaio is working as a PhD student in Organization and Personnel Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Thao graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'Network Community Structures in Markov Influence Graphs.'

Thao is working as a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, under the supervision of Bernd Heidergott and Ines Lindner. Her research interests include network analysis and generative AI.

Finn graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'Novel Generative Summaries: Safer Prompts & More Insightful Market Research?'' His research master thesis develops a new method to summarize documents with LLMs.

Finn is working as a PhD student in Quantitative Marketing at the Erasmus School of Economics. 

Jason graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'Longevity-linked securities pricing.'

Jason is working as PhD student in the Section Accounting of the Amsterdam Business School. 

Irene graduated from the program in 2024. Thesis title: 'A Computational Narrative Review of career success.' Supervisor was Professor Corine Boon (UvA). 

Irene is currently working as a PhD student at the Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology (LUT) in Finland, under the supervision of Professor Paavo Ritala. 

Bernd graduated from the program in 2025, specialising in marketing analytics and digital platforms. Thesis title: 'Strategic Diversification on Digital Platforms: Performance Effects of Multi-Channel Content Strategies'. Research field: Markting.

Bernd is continuing with a PhD in strategic marketing, researching decision-making, influencers, and platform dynamics at both Aachen University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

Just graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title:  'Extremes with random covariates'. Research field: Data Science and Econometrics. 

Just is continuing with a PhD at the Econometrics Institute at the Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Chen Zhou and Phyllis Wan. Just has an interest in extreme value theory, high-dimensional methods, and finding connections between fields. Just has a background in Econometrics, Mathematical Statistics, Probability Theory, and Machine Learning theory, which has been supplemented with coding in Python, R, and Java through different university and commerical projects.

Özgün studied engineering and worked as a management consultant before he started the BDS program. Özgün graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'A Comparison of Contextual Optimization and Reinforcement Learning on Battery Arbitrage in Electricity Markets'. Research field: Operation Analytics. 

Özgün continues with a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University. He plans to work at the intersection of Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence, particularly on Reinforcement Learning. Özgün is fascinated by the theoretical and algorithmic side of AI but would also like to apply and have an impact on the world of tomorrow. 

Kevin graduated from the Business Data Science program in 2025. Thesis title: 'The Impact of the Accountant Shortage on GenAI Adoption in MD&A Disclosures'. Research field: Accounting and Finance. 

Kevin continued in a PhD trajectory at the Accounting department of the Erasmus School of Economics. His supervisors are Jeroen Suijs and Jochen Pierk. 

Luuk graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'Clustering-Based Estimation of Score-Driven Models for Extremes'. Research field: Data Science and Econometrics.

Luuk contined as a PhD student in Financial Econometrics at the Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Michel van der Wel and Onno Kleen. 

Aleksandr is a data scientist whose interests lie in business applications of data science and analytics, focusing on how data-based solutions can accelerate workflows within companies. He graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'Does DEI Affect Film Profits and Reception? A Data-Driven Inquiry Into the Impact of Diversity in Films'. Field: Data Science and Econometrics. 

Aleksandr is currently working as a Data Scientist/Product Analyst at ETFbook. 

Mingxuan Song graduated from the research master program in 2025. Thesis title: 'Robust Location Filters Using a Continuum of Characteristic Function Based Moment Conditions'. Research field: Data Science and Econometrics. 

Mingxuan is currently working as a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit, under the supervision of Andre Lucas. 

Ranjan graduated from the research master in 2025. Thesis title: 'Admissible Discrimination: A Framework for Fair Machine Learning'. Ranjan's thesis was supervised by Bas Donkers (Erasmus University).

Ranjan is currently as a PhD student at Groningen University, at the Faculty of Science and Engineering. 

Thu Trang graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'Capacity Allocation to Optimize Healthcare Accessibility in Low- and Middle-Income Countries'. Research field: Operations Analytics. 

Thu Trang continues in a PhD trajectory at UvA, under the supervision of Dick den Hertog, Michel Mandjes and Alex Kuiper. 

Yixiao graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'When Warnings Meet Promotions: Evidence from Retail Media Effectiveness Under Colombia’s Comprehensive Food Tax'. Research field: Marketing. 

Yixiao continues her research in a PhD trajectory at UvA, under the supervision of Jonne Guyt. 

Paul graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'A Multivariate Implicit Score-Driven Approach for Modeling Time-Varying Volatilities and Correlations', under the supervision of Dick van Dijk and Rutger Jan Lange. 

Paul continues in a PhD trajectory at the School of Business and Economics at the Maastricht University, department of Quantitative Economics. 

Reza graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: 'Asymmetric Charity Auctions', under the supervision of Sander Onderstal and Jan-Willem Stoelhorst. 

Reza continues in a PhD trajectory at the School of Economics at the University of Amsterdam, section Microeconomics.

Merle graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: “Cost-aware Multimodal Prediction of Antidepressant Response in Major Depressive Disorder”. Field: Operations Analytics. 

Merle is currently a trainee at the Environmental Economics department of the Joint Research Center of the European Commission in Seville, applying her knowledge and machine learning skills to contribute to new findings in industrial networks of the European Union and potential fund allocation.

Julius graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: "Specializing Large Language Models in Finance", under the supervision of dr. Svetlana Borovkova. 

Julius is currently working at Fitz as a Data & AI Consultant.

Lars graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title: "Does News Sentiment Walk the Talk? A Network Analysis of Volatility Spillover Dynamics around News Events", under the supervision of Simon Trimborn. 

Lars is currently working as Analyst & Applied AI Engineer at Foremost Partners. 

Márton graduated from the program in 2025. Thesis title is: "Let’s Agree to Disagree: Mutual Fund Holdings–Based Disagreement and the Time Series of Stock Returns" . 

Márton is currently working at Goldman Sachs QIS as a Quantitative Researcher. 

Batuhan graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title is: "Plausibility-Constrained Generative Scenario Design for Explaining a Predict-Optimize Portfolio Pipeline". 

Batuhan continues in a PhD trajectory at the Amsterdam Business School (UvA) under the supervision of Professor Ilker Birbil. 

Girius graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title is: "Extreme Value Theory for Cure Models". 

Girius is currently doing a PhD at the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on applying extreme value theory to cure estimation in survival analysis. Supervisors are Dr. Eni Musta and Dr. Juan Juan Cai.

Vincent graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title is: "When Posting More Helps and Hurts: How Higher Posting Frequency Grows audiences but Erodes Engagement". 

Vincent is currently in a PhD trajectory at the Erasmus School of Economics in the Marketing department. 

Leon graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Traversing Discontinuities: Approximating Best Subset Selection by Surrogate ℓp-Continuation with Adaptive Step Size and ADMM".

Leon started in a PhD trajectory at the Erasmus School of Economics under supervision of Professor Patrick Groenen, Dr Olga Kuryatnikova and Dr Carlo Cavicchia.

Luuk graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Memory and Adaptation in Score-Driven Filters". 

Luuk continues in a PhD trajectory at the Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Professor Dick van Dijk, Dr Annika Camehl and Dr Rutger Jan Lange. 

Robert graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Route Optimization for Waste Collection under Demand Uncertainty: A Case Study of a Dutch Waste Collection Company".

Aleksander graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Online change point detection for regression coefficients via weighted empirical risk minimization". 

Aleksander is currenty in a PhD trajectory at the Erasmus School of Economics, supervised by Professor Chen Zhou and Dr Alexander Mayer.

Kyungmin graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "How to Sell Less Meat: Evidence from a Unilateral Retail Promotion Discontinuation". 

Kyungmin is working on her PhD at the Amsterdam Business School (UvA), supervised by Dr Jonne Guyt and Dr Bernadette van Ewijk. 

Jiayuan graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Measuring Emotional Labor and Its Value". 

Jiayuan continues as a PhD student at Tilburg University. 

Ji graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title is: "Where Is Short Selling Most Informative? A Signal-Mode Panel-Tree Approach". 

Ji is currently working as a PhD student at the Erasmus School of Economics under the supervision of Professor Patrick Verwijmeren and Dr Amar Soebhag. 

Ekaterina graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Motivated Interpretation of Feedback Informativeness".

Ekaterina is pursuing her PhD at the Amsterdam School of Economics under the supervision of Professor Thomas Buser and Professor Joel van der Weele. 

Gilda graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Same Façade, Different Roles: Network-Based Role Clustering of Real Estate Portfolio". 

Gilda is currently working in the industry as a Data Science Consultant, using and applying the knowledge she gained in the courses at BDS.

Anhui graduated from the program in 2026. Thesis title: "Energy-Aware Adaptive Multimodal Scheduling for Online Temporal Action Segmentation on Wearable Devices”.