The Case Centre Names UVA Darden Professor Casey Lichtendahl Outstanding Case Teacher of 2015

The Case Centre announced today that Casey Lichtendahl, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, has won the 2015 new competition of Outstanding Case Teacher. The annual Awards and Competitions, now in their 25th year, celebrate excellence in case writing and teaching in business education worldwide.

Lichtendahl teaches Quantitative Analysis courses in Darden’s MBA and Executive Education programs. He teaches students how to apply advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to key business problems and immerses them in the world of practical data science.

The judges applauded Lichtendahl’s innovative, case-based approach. They said:

• “I really liked that Casey was mixing traditional cases with coding, something that is unusual and yet poised to become more important as schools learn to teach students how to use big data.”
• “This was the first ranked proposal for me because of the degree of effort, creativity and domain depth required to build a new course with ten new cases mined from real-world scenarios.”
• “He further involves past students who are now working in the class to discuss situations they experience in the workforce. Overall, I commend this teacher for his creativity, his huge initiative in case writing and his deployment of a case-based education approach in a topic that could otherwise be handled with very typical lecture based/lab based approach.”

Lichtendahl helps managers cope with the uncertainty of the future through probability forecasting. His areas of expertise include decision analysis, dynamic programming and Bayesian statistics. His  research focuses on eliciting, evaluating and combining probability forecasts and on modelling the consumption/investment choices of individuals.

He began his professional career in the beverage industry and, in the 1990s, co-founded the Tradewinds company.

“Winning the competition means a great deal to me. It is very gratifying to be recognized for engaging MBA students in a technical discipline such as data science. In my view, there is too little focus in top MBA programs on developing these advanced technical skills,” said Lichtendahl.

“The future business world needs MBA students who can manage both the people and the processes in the information age. I am proud to offer students the opportunity to develop these crucial capabilities and I hope this award will encourage other faculty who teach similar material to find their voice. We need more data science taught in MBA programs around the world,” he said.