a bit about me:

I am an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy in the Management and Organizations Department at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business and the Research Director of the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship. My research program sits at the intersection of strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organizational theory, addressing fundamental questions in the social sciences: how to disentangle agency from structure, how social relationships create value, and how institutional, structural, and behavioral frictions impede the deployment of high-value knowledge and technology.

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My scholarship has been recognized with major honors in the field of management, including top awards from the Academy of Management (AOM) and Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ).

 

Prior to joining Cornell, I held faculty appointments at NYU Stern and the Wharton School, served as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and Northeastern University, and was the Head Economist at Homebase, a venture-backed tech company in San Francisco. I earned my Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago.

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Research Agenda & Methodological Rigor

My research program is fundamentally theory-driven in its design, inquiry, and data generation. Rather than viewing empirical settings in isolation, I seek out unique research settings and strategic partnerships best suited to advance core theoretical questions:

• Structural Frictions & Relational Value: Investigating how social relationships and structural positions create economic value, and how environmental shocks reconfigure networks. This includes developing theory and data partnerships to causally test relational styles (Management Science), within-person network mechanisms in MBA hiring (Sociological Science), and social tie formation in early-stage capital markets.

• Organizational Adaptation & Market Dynamics: Utilizing field settings (e.g., the hospitality and restaurant industry) to examine organizational learning, strategic repositioning, and competitive dynamics under environmental shifts (Strategic Management Journal).

• Solo vs. Co-Founding Team Dynamics: Conducting some of the first empirical work demonstrating the performance benefits of founding a startup alone, as well as the distinct liabilities of founding with strangers.

• Economic Frictions & Knowledge Translation: Examining institutional disincentives surrounding scientific replication, patenting, and venture capital, tracing how unverified science generates downstream financial contagion and distorts deep-tech commercialization.

 

Methodological Breadth & Theoretical Contributions

My empirical and conceptual toolkit spans the full spectrum of modern strategic management and sociological inquiry:

• Pure Theory: Developing conceptual frameworks that advance core organizational and social theory regarding the micro-mechanisms underlying network exchange (e.g., Administrative Science Quarterly, Sociological Theory).

• Experimental Rigor & Protocol Design: Engineering unique experimental protocols (e.g., Organization Science) to isolate network position effects from individual agency, alongside instrumental variables, within-person designs, and natural or lab-in-the-field random assignment (e.g., Management Science, Sociological Science).

• Causal Identification & Unique Data Acquisition: Utilizing high-dimensional administrative datasets, instrumental variables, and quasi-experimental designs to cleanly isolate causal mechanisms from confounding selection effects.

 

My work is published in leading management, strategy, and sociology journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, Sociological Theory, and Sociological Science.