UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Dr. Susan Love Hurdled Sexism to Make Greater Strides toward a Cure for Cancer

UCLA Professor of Surgery, breast cancer activist and Anderson alumna Susan Love delivers the morning keynote address at Velocity, UCLA Anderson's women's leadership summit, on Friday, February 9. Register now!

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Dr. Susan Love (’98) has been battling cancer for most of her life.

She’s battled it as a surgeon, as the founder of both the Faulkner Breast Center in Boston and the Revlon UCLA Breast Center here in Westwood. As the author of the definitive book on the subject, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, she’s helped millions of readers to battle it themselves. Today, she continues to take the fight to the disease as chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.

Love has also battled the disease in her personal life. Now cancer free, she is a survivor of leukemia. As she prepared her keynote remarks for UCLA Anderson’s 6th annual Velocity Women’s Leadership Summit, she took time out to speak with the UCLA Anderson Blog.

Q: What did your own experience with cancer teach you about fighting the disease?

It taught me (about) the collateral damage, the long-term consequences of treatments — what we euphemistically in the medical profession call “side effects.” But really, they’re not side effects, they last forever. They’re more like having your car in a crash. You can get it fixed, but the passenger door never quite opens the same way again.

After cancer, there are certain things that just don’t get better. We’ve made a lot of progress in treating metastatic breast cancer. We still can’t cure it, but we can certainly keep people alive a lot longer than we could in the past. The problem is that it’s not without a cost of collateral damage. And if you only have a limited amount of time, we certainly would like your quality of life to be as good as possible.

UCLA Awards Dr. Martine Rothblatt Its Highest Honor: The UCLA Medal

By Paul Feinberg and Carolyn Gray Anderson

In a popular series of television advertisements, a narrator describes the accomplishments of a charismatic swashbuckler, ultimately concluding that the fictional figure is, in fact, “the most interesting man in the world.”

Allow UCLA Anderson’s Dean Judy Olian to set the record straight: “Martine Rothblatt is the most interesting person you will ever meet,” the dean said in welcoming Rothblatt back to Anderson this week.

Rothblatt (B.A. ’77, MBA/J.D. ’81), whose company United Therapeutics is based in Silver Spring, Maryland, returned to UCLA to be honored with the UCLA Medal in a ceremony at the home of UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. Before the medal ceremony, Rothblatt participated in a lively question and answer chat with Olian as part of UCLA Anderson’s Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

In the conversation, Rothblatt credited the interdisciplinary education UCLA afforded her as an undergraduate and graduate student for much of her remarkable success. Named by Forbes as one of the World’s 100 Greatest Living Business Minds, Rothblatt leads a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company that has brought life-saving treatments to market. Proudly transgendered, a medical ethicist, recognized as a technology and artificial intelligence pioneer, and now advancing the science of organ and consciousness transplantation, Rothblatt told the UCLA audience — which included UCLA Law School Dean Jennifer Mnookin and Department of Communications Chair Kerri Johnson — “This is what it looks like to ‘program’ someone with a UCLA curriculum.”

CES at Anderson, Where Technology Shakes Hands with Science

Enjoy the complete album of photos from CES at Anderson

UCLA Anderson’s annual CES^® event, held in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)^TM following the world-renowned CES conference in Las Vegas, attracted audiences among the wider community of UCLA students, faculty and staff, as well as industry professionals and business leaders.

The CES at Anderson differentiator is the university context, where rigorous scientific research meets entrepreneurship across disciplines. Professor Mayank Mehta, who teaches in UCLA’s departments of physics and astronomy and neurobiology, and Dr. Ramin Ramezani, assistant adjunct professor of computer science, both lent expertise to panels that explored machine learning, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Several Anderson alumni chimed in with insights from their positions at companies that include Epson, Sengled and Deepgram. Dyan Decker (’02), PwC’s U.S. forensic technology leader, sat down with Easton Technology Management Center faculty director John Blevins for a conversation about CES in Las Vegas, where the emphasis was on rapidly developing smart home technology and the race to refine virtual assistants.

Big Data Conference: Value Is Derived When Data Is Turned into Insights, then Translated Into Action

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View Big Data Conference photos on Facebook

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By Cheechee Lin

At UCLA Anderson’s second annual Big Data Conference, attendees gathered to discuss the implications and importance of harnessing the power of this growing, seemingly ubiquitous discipline. As Professor Guillaume Roels, faculty director of the Easton Technology Management Center, put it: “Big data is getting bigger.”

The November 18 conference, held in Korn Convocation Hall before a standing-room-only audience, featured a distinguished lineup of panelists and keynote speakers. In one session, Jason Lee, principal at Bain & Company, led the audience through key insights the company has gleaned from helping clients use data science. As the volume, variety and velocity of data accelerate and the big data infrastructure has expanded, he said, Bain’s clients have had to work hard to stay up to date. The changes have also disrupted the way companies work, reshaping processes, companies and industries along the way.

Lee demonstrated the value of employing big data through the stories of three key clients. In the first, Bain assisted a media distribution company to connect its siloed data sets to provide a single view of the customer across the company, and in turn helped break barriers inside the internal organizational structure. This greatly accelerated the company’s leaders’ ability to think about the future.  

Big Names at Big Data Conference Confront Analytics Challenges, Unlock Opportunities

By Cheechee Lin

The Big Data Conference returns to UCLA Anderson for the second time on Friday, November 18.

Who should attend? This conference is for technologists, managers, directors, executives and entrepreneurs who are either providing technology solutions for their organization or using data analytics to make business decisions across all functional areas. Executives and director-level representatives from IBM, Google, Netflix, Uber, Microsoft and many other companies will participate as panelists or keynote speakers.

With the immense growth of the volumes of data collected, and the decrease in costs of acquiring and storing data, corporations and startups of every scale are equipped with a huge competitive advantage to extract valuable insights when they extract data to answer key business questions.

This one-day interactive conference, organized by the Easton Technology Management Center and the Center for MEMES at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, aims to explore big data challenges and opportunities by bringing together a cross section of industry experts and academic thought leaders who are shaping and defining the conversation around the business aspects of big data.

“Big data has been, and continues to be, an important area for UCLA Anderson,” says Dr. Vandana Mangal, Easton’s executive director. “Big data and analytics have been taught in our classes at Anderson since as early as 2012.”

UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference Tackles Debate around Pharmaceutical Pricing

By Sicong Li (’17)

The Second annual UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference officially kicks off on Saturday, January 30, with the theme Innovation at a Crossroads. Be sure to ink this event into your date books, because you’ll want to hear what happens at the conference.

Why? Consider this: Last August, Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired a drug called Daraprim and quickly raised the drug’s price from $13.50 per tablet to an appallingly hard-to-swallow $750 per tablet. Daraprim is a 62-year-old drug long considered the standard of care for life-threatening parasitic infection. More alarmingly, this is not an isolated occurrence, huge price increases are being seen across the board.

In fact, at the forefront of public discourse are health care costs and pharmaceutical pricing, like the Daraprim example and a recent subpoena of Valeant pharmaceuticals in response to steep price hikes for two of its heart drugs. The health care conference will provide a morning panel on these topics featuring Matt Nye, vice president of pharmacy service at Blue Shield, and Chad Pettit, value and access director at Amgen. Attendees can most likely expect an impassioned discussion.

Big Data Takes Over UCLA Anderson

By Nathan Moorman

On Friday, November 20, UCLA Anderson hosted Big Data: Big Impact with executives and thought leaders from all over the world coming together to discuss big data.

The conference is part of Big Data Week, one of the most unique global platforms of interconnected community events focusing on the social, political and technological impacts of big data. The conversations on Friday covered a variety of topics, ranging from a general discussion about why big data matters in the 21st century to a more focused conversation on using big data to improve marketing strategies.

Dominique Hanssens, Bud Knapp Distinguished Professor of Marketing and faculty director of the new Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytic sat UCLA Anderson, moderated the first discussion among panelists, who talked about the impact on consumers as well as the effect of big data socially and globally.

AOL’s Bob Lord Wants Facebook and Google to Open Their Data Mines — Now

By Andy Tillman

UCLA Anderson’s Big Data: Big Impact conference was held Friday, November 20, and sponsored by UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES). Speakers included a who’s who of big data players, including the event’s keynote Bob Lord, president of AOL overseeing the company’s unified global advertising operations. Sanjay Sood, MEMES faculty director and professor of marketing, sat down with Lord to discuss the ongoing tug-of-war between advertisers and companies unwilling to share their consumer data.

The keynote focused on a discussion of the collection, access and usage of open data — information to which ad agencies have access — versus so-called “walled gardens,” an industry term applied to companies like Google and Facebook, who use closed systems to keep their user information private, limiting the consumer data advertising agencies are able to access. Agencies would like more specific information in order to build a profile of their clients’ consumers that goes deeper than simply market-segmented psychographics and demographics.

“Currently companies like Facebook and Google, who have huge audiences, offer only segmented reports, limiting knowledge and information about your consumers, so you don’t know your consumer. Agencies need to demand data so they can become a value added service,” said Lord.

Daniel Oppenheimer: Better Living through Science

Professor Danny Oppenheimer studies the way we humans move through this world, making untold numbers of decisions minute by minute. His research focuses on decision making, especially in relation to what information we listen to and what we tune out. He also studies charitable giving, the psychological underpinnings of democracy and much more.

Oppenheimer received his B.A. from Rice University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Prior to joining the UCLA Anderson marketing faculty, he was jointly appointed in psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, where he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award.

He edited and contributed to The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity and co-authored Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System that Shouldn’t Work at All Works so Well. He is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed articles, and his work has been covered by media outlets as diverse as The Economist and Glamour.

We asked Oppenheimer about his interest in psychology, what we should know about charitable giving and what winning one of academia’s most notorious and funny “awards” means to him.

Q: How did you get interested in psychology as an academic pursuit?

I had a number of fantastic mentors in psychology who nurtured my interest in the field and helped me find my strengths and my passion. I was always interested in the human mind, but what brought me into the field was the people.

Q: How did you get interested in investigating charitable giving and the psychological underpinnings of democracy?

Charitable Giving
I was initially intrigued by the discrepancy in giving between the Asian Tsunami and the Kashmir earthquake. People were so generous in response to the tsunami, but much, much less so in response to the earthquake. But both natural disasters were in similar locations, affected similar populations, and caused enormous damage. I wanted to see if I could find out why one led to so much more philanthropy than the other. As I got more involved in charitable giving, my interests broadened a bit, and I never actually solved the puzzle that got me interested in the first place.

Democracy
I study human decision making, and most of what I find isn’t flattering. People often make frighteningly bad decisions. I was talking about my research to Mike Edwards, a political scientist, and speculating on the implications for democracy, and he told me about work in political science showing that democracies were incredibly effective forms of government. This seemed like a paradox — how is it possible that if the inputs into the system (human decisions) were so bad, that the outcomes (welfare for the citizens) could be so good. We started collaborating, and it led to the book Democracy Despite Itself, which addresses this paradox in detail.

Q: What was the impetus for the book you co-edited, The Science of Giving?

At the time, there were many researchers studying giving, but mostly in isolated pockets. Norms researchers were studying how norms led to giving; emotion researchers were studying how emotions led to giving, etc. To really have an impact, we needed to aggregate the findings into a central source, hence the book. We were able to get a number of key charity researchers to contribute, representing the state of the art of what we knew about why and how people give.

Q: Did any of the book’s findings really surprise you?

Many things surprised me. My intuitions about giving are nearly always wrong. I know a lot about charity because I’ve read a lot about charity, but I’m perpetually surprised by the findings. It’s one reason that it’s important to do empirical studies of these topics: our intuitions about why people give are often inaccurate, and so when fundraisers go off of their intuitions, they are often less effective than they otherwise might be.

Q: You were “honored” with a 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature. Can you describe the research you won for and what that experience was like?

The paper was on how using long words (in an attempt to appear smarter) can actually backfire and lead people to think you are less intelligent. It was a fantastically fun ceremony and an honor I’m quite proud of. It’s great to be able to do science, but it’s even better to be able to have fun while doing it.

Living with LHON

By Nathan Moorman

When Lissa Poincenot’s (’83) son Jeremy turned 19 in 2008, he mysteriously lost his central vision, first in one eye and then the other. He could no longer drive, distinguish faces nor read without extreme magnification. Eventually, doctors diagnosed him with a rare genetic disorder called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy. LHON has no treatment and no cure.

Poincenot responded the only way a mother can, with pure, unrestrained determination. Drawing on her UCLA Anderson education, she rose as a leader in the LHON community. She established a philanthropic company to raise money for research and generate awareness and, along the way, became a recognized voice in the LHON patient community. Poincenot is a sought-after source of guidance and information for families thrust into a world of blindness.

Because LHON is so rare, patients tend to be isolated and struggle to find information on how to adjust to their sudden vision loss. Poincenot’s goal was to connect patients around the world so they can share information, support one another and collectively change the future of LHON. Through her work, they have support groups and communities in 10 different countries around the world.