Diab “Dody” Eid

University of Notre Dame, Mendoza School of Business

“I am a passionate Lebanese-American committed to faith, family, and the pursuit of excellence.”

Hometown: Nashua, New Hampshire

Fun fact about yourself: I led an unconventional percussion group called THUD: The Harvard Undergraduate Drummers to 50 million+ views on YouTube.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Harvard University, A.B. in Economics

What was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school?I worked as a Senior Analyst at Analysis Group, a leading economic consulting firm.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? I built my startup, TriviaLinked, at the Notre Dame IDEA Center. TriviaLinked is a daily trivia competition that’s available on the App Store.

Where will you be working after graduation? I am excited to return to Analysis Group as an Associate.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Vice President of Faith Development for the MBA Student Government
• Kenneth R. Meyer Fellow (Full-tuition merit scholarship)
• Mentor for the Notre Dame Undergraduate Business Honors Program
• Teaching Assistant for “God and Business” and “Why Business?”
• Piano Instructor in South Bend

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I am most proud to have served my class as VP of Faith Development in the MBA Student Government. My primary mandate has been to integrate Notre Dame’s deeply spiritual and traditional character with the more technical and innovative pedagogy of the business school.

I formed a Faith Development Committee to build up three pillars of campus life: prayer, community, and intellectual formation. During my term, I started a weekly rosary in the business school chapel and organized class service trips to Our Lady of the Road, a local homeless outreach organization. I also brought classmates and family members of all faith backgrounds together by starting a tradition of serving homemade Swedish crêpes and waffles every Sunday following Mass. On the intellectual front, I started a “Faith & Reason” speaker series that recently featured a fireside chat titled “Does God Exist?” with Professor John C. Cavadini, a world-renowned theologian. None of our success would have been possible without the help of my classmates Alex Redle, George Sutherland, Derrick Deidrich, Joe Richard, and Megan Whelan.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? In my career, I am most proud to have successfully launched a firm-wide data visualization tool while working at Analysis Group. What began as a personal coding project quickly grew to become one of the most utilized coding tools at the firm, reducing chart-creation time by approximately 70 percent. The experience challenged me to grow my technical skills, collaborate more effectively with various stakeholders, and lead a small team of developers across offices to deliver and maintain the final product.

Why did you choose this business school? Notre Dame, as many have noted, holds a unique place in the world as being both a leading research university and an institution strongly committed to its Catholic mission—with a stellar football program to boot. For my MBA, I wanted to situate the practice of business in the broader context of both “big C” Catholic (formal Catholic sacramental life) and “little c” catholic (universal outreach to people of all faith backgrounds) values.

When I first visited Notre Dame with my father for admitted students’ weekend, we attended Mass at the beautiful Basilica and spoke to MBA students afterwards. This would be the first of many encounters with the supportive, down-to-earth, and collaborative peers that define the Notre Dame community. I also first read the words of business school founder Cardinal O’Hara, so prominently displayed in Stayer Hall, that “the primary function of commerce is service to mankind.” I believed after that weekend that Notre Dame would be a place I could pursue a business education with a social purpose and meet lifelong friends. My expectations have only been exceeded.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course in the MBA, and my favorite course of all time, was Why Business? by Professor Otteson. This class adds intricate and thought-provoking layers to a typical business ethics course. We discuss topics like the moral concerns surrounding capitalism, the specialization of labor, and income inequality. Traditional business school skills like SQL and double-entry accounting serve important functions, but using them without the rich context of the mission-driven education I received in Why Business? would have risked divorcing the pursuit of business from its human end.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? After every Notre Dame football game—win or lose—the team joins the fans to sing the Alma Mater. To me, this tradition symbolizes that, no matter the outcome of any worldly pursuit, we stand by each other as Notre Dame family, confidently entrusting ourselves to the prayers of Our Lady.

Looking back at your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I wish I had made more of an effort to have my mom come visit campus. I would not be who I am today without her, and I know that she would have loved to come see the Basilica, learn about Notre Dame’s history, and meet my wonderful classmates. Thankfully, there is still a bit of time for her to visit!

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? Good business decisions require both data and qualitative judgment. In Global Capital Markets with Professor Gianna Bern, I was tasked with assessing the historical performance of a derivatives hedging strategy for a large auto manufacturer. The strategy turned out to be quite profitable, but the case asked: Was the firm prudent in taking on considerable risk in equity derivatives markets, especially given its nature as an auto manufacturer? A proper approach to that question required not only understanding the mathematical mechanics of risk, but also making an ultimately subjective assessment on how to incorporate the math into a final decision. My biggest takeaway was that neither rigorous quantitative analysis nor gut feeling alone are sufficient to make good business choices; rather, the combination of hard figures and instinct born of experience is essential to prudential judgment.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? South Bend’s great Midwestern appeal is its family-friendly culture. It is common to see families attending Notre Dame football games, ice skating in Howard Park, or hosting barbecues with neighbors in the spring. Strong familial and communal bonds keep me grounded in the midst of our busy course load, and the example set by classmates like Michael Kemna and Antanas Riskus—both fathers pursuing business with young children—inspire me to be a better leader.

What business leader do you admire most? When it comes to business leadership, I look to Alex Jones, co-founder of the prayer app Hallow and Notre Dame alumnus. Hallow’s trajectory defies conventional business school wisdom. Alex started the app after becoming more interested in prayer. His beginnings at Hallow were not easy; he went through multiple failed rounds of fundraising, succeeding after what can only be described as a miraculous investor meeting. Today, Hallow has grown to become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, even briefly surpassing ChatGPT in App Store downloads this past Lenten season. Alex and the team he built at Hallow accomplished all of this not in spite of their commitment to faith and family, but because of it. He therefore stands as a model for all aspiring business leaders.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? At the Notre Dame IDEA Center, I participated in an AI masterclass by Malcolm Werchota that fundamentally changed my work process. My three key takeaways from his talk were the following:

1) Speak to AI

2) Use LLMs to draft web applications

3) Leverage AI site-builders like Replit for internal tooling

I implemented these strategies to streamline the development of my daily trivia game, TriviaLinked. Speaking to AI reduced product update cycle times. AI site-builders let me customize a data dashboard to provide stakeholders a live feed of key performance indicators like player retention and daily active user counts. What would have taken years was finished in less than two months.

My experience taught me that AI is a powerful tool that can and will revolutionize routine workstreams, but, by its very nature, it struggles with creativity, design, and solving complex problems that require higher-level reasoning. I therefore envision work requiring such skills to become even more valuable as time goes on.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Alex Redle keeps me humble, but more than that, he is the embodiment of true Aristotelian friendship. He challenges me to be more honest, more patient, and ultimately, more loving. I am especially grateful for all his behind-the-scenes work, especially his help in bolstering the efforts of the Faith Development Committee, and I am excited to see what the future holds for him.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

I hope my daily trivia app, TriviaLinked, grows to become the top daily destination for trivia lovers across the world. Besides this, with the encouragement and aesthetic insight of my classmate and good friend John Cappuzzello, I would love to one day open a family-run Swedish crêperie with my lovely girlfriend Yasmin Luthra, featuring live music and a library oriented toward classic literature, philosophy, and language learning.

What made Dody such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Some MBA students view the degree as a tool, as a means enabling them to achieve some other goal they have: a promotion, a new position, maybe a new career. Their approach to the degree itself can hence be somewhat transactional: I pay for the program, I do the work I am required to do, and you give me the degree to help me achieve my goals.

Dody Eid is not like that. For Dody, studying is an end in itself. If having an MBA enables him to achieve other ends, that is an added benefit. But for Dody, learning is itself the primary goal. He pours himself into each of his classes, desiring not simply to do what he must but to master the material. He thus routinely goes well above-and-beyond the required coursework, reading journal articles, reading books, studying ideas that undergird the course’s material or that take that material’s implications in new and interesting directions. And Dody is wicked smart, so his intellectual pursuit takes him very far indeed.

But Dody is also committed to the idea of engaging in business honorably. He continuously asks himself how he can use his talents and the technical knowledge and experience he has gained to improve the lives of others. How he can recognize and respect the dignity of everyone he encounters, and how his work can enable integral human development—both of himself and others. He views working in business as a calling to engage in human community, to connect with others in ways that make everyone better off, personally, professionally, and socially.

Dody is humble and gentle yet relentlessly curious. His presence inspires his professors to be the best they can be, but it also inspires his fellow students to constantly ask more of themselves. When Dody innocently but earnestly asks them why they are doing what they are doing, his peers feel not only the pull but the depth of the question. And it encourages them to deliberate thoughtfully to find the answer.

Dody exemplifies not only the technical mastery we want from MBA students but the moral orientation toward the common good that we hope for. He is thus well on the road to becoming a business professional who inspires everyone he works with to “grow the good in business.”

James R. Otteson
John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics
Faculty Director, Business Honors Program
Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame

 

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