A Rising Academic Star Tackles Big Data

In an era when advances in digital technology are transforming the business world, Maryam Farboodi, PhD ’14, is leading the way with her groundbreaking research in big data. 

In 2024, Farboodi, the Jon D. Gruber Career Development Associate Professor of Finance at MIT Sloan School of Management, won two prestigious honors: a Sloan Research Fellowship and the Elaine Bennett Research Prize awarded by the American Economic Association. 

“I have been really lucky this past year,” she says. “I hope these prizes are a sign of broader interest from the profession in this new line of research I am pursuing.” 

Farboodi credits Booth with introducing her to finance and says, “I learned very much from Professors Gene Fama and John Cochrane [now at Stanford]. I also had the privilege of working concurrently with Professors Lars Hansen, Douglas Diamond, Raghuram Rajan, and Zhiguo He [now at Stanford]. Not only are they brilliant minds and very deep thinkers, but they also are incredibly supportive and generous with their time. And their role did not end once I got my PhD. It continues today.” 

Farboodi stands out for “her willingness to tackle difficult problems, often giving them a new twist that results in interesting insights,” Rajan says. “She certainly has been an important contributor to network theory and, more recently, to our understanding of cryptocurrencies.” 

Over the past seven years, Farboodi has published 11 major papers on big data and other subjects and has five others underway. One of her frequent collaborators and coauthors is Columbia’s Laura Veldkamp. Farboodi says her research projects typically take four to five years to complete. 

“AI uses big data to make predictions and provide actionable insights into the complex market structures that determine the quality, availability, and pricing of consumer products and services,” she says. “A lot of my work is applied theory and focuses on less-explored topics. Thus it takes a long time to develop the idea in a way that both represents the economics of the phenomena and is accessible for a broad audience.” 

Eugene F. Fama, MBA ’64, PhD ’64, is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance. Lars Hansen is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago Departments of Economics and Statistics and at Chicago Booth. Douglas W. Diamond is the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance. All three are Nobel laureates. Raghuram G. Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance. He was the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India.