2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Mochen Yang, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Mochen Yang
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

“Mochen Yang personifies scholarship as an innovative researcher and a dedicated classroom leader. Since returning to Carlson in 2019, he has rapidly ascended to tenure while also leaving a lasting impression on his students with his passion to demystify complex algorithmic systems. He embodies the ideal P&Q 40 Under 40 candidate as a driving force in the research community, actively shaping how students and business leaders use AI responsibly and effectively. 

“He has a way of making daunting, complex topics more accessible. This is most seen in his Introduction to Business Analytics in R course, which is one of the first courses in the MSBA program. While the students are learning a programming language, he impresses upon his students that the true lesson is how to problem solve in a business setting. After learning the foundational frameworks, students take on a live business case to make a real-world impact as the capstone for the course. In addition to encouraging students to think critically, he has tested ways to augment his teaching style by using AI to create a course-specific chatbot for after-hours help.” – Rose Semenov, Associate Director of Strategic Communication

Mochen Yang, 36, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at Minnesota Carlson, University of Minnesota.

His studies algorithmic decision-making from both a “make” perspective and a “use” perspective. From the make perspective, he designs theoretically robust and computationally efficient algorithms to support decision-making in information-intensive environment. From the use perspective, he examines the antecedents of algorithmic decision-making as well as its impact on decision quality, fairness, and privacy.

His scholarly work has been published in top business journals including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, as well as other domain-specific outlets such as ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), and INFORMS Journal on Data Science. He is the recipient of INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award (2018) and INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Gordon B Davis Young Scholar Award (2023).

At Minnesota Carlson, Mochen teaches several business analytics and AI courses in the Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program. He won the MSBA Outstanding Teacher award for five consecutive years from 2020 to 2024. He also received the Carlson School of Management Outstanding Research Award in 2023.

BACKGROUND

At current institution since what year? 2019

Education: Ph.D. from University of Minnesota, B.A. from Tsinghua University

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: Introduction to Business Analytics in R, AI for Natural Language Processing, Responsible AI

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …I was in the undergraduate program at Tsinghua University and got interested in studying how people interact with each other through technological artifacts such as social networks.

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? My most current research interest focuses on understanding the fundamental limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) from a technical perspective. An ongoing project with my colleague Gediminas Adomavicius and Ph.D. student Hejia Liu found that LLMs, when being applied to fit tabular data and generate predictions, lack a basic level of robustness. Superficial changes in data representation (e.g., shuffling rows / columns, changing variable names) can cause LLMs to generate significantly different predictions on the same data.

If I weren’t a business school professor… I would probably be a consultant helping companies deliver value with AI.

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I try my best to illustrate the practical importance of the things I teach and always try to convey the “intuition” behind technical concepts. Flexing technical complexity is easy, explaining a deep concept using everyday language so that beginners can understand is not.

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: You have to balance many responsibilities.

Professor I most admire and why: My former advisor and current colleague Gediminas Adomavicius. Smartest and simultaneously most humble person I personally know. Most things I know about being a professor I learned from him.

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? We get to connect abstract technical knowledge with tangible business impact.

What is most challenging? There are many distractions. It’s not easy to convince students to focus on the basics.

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Rule-based. I set clear rules in syllabus and stick to them.

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM

What are your hobbies? Cooking and movies

How will you spend your summer? With my family in China.

Favorite place(s) to vacation: China (Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an).

Favorite book(s): The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? Pantheon (from Netflix). I’m a sci-fi fan.

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? Black Myth: Wukong soundtrack (if you grew up reading the Journey to the West and the legends of Sun Wukong, you will understand)

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… Conversion of research / teaching efforts into real business products / processes / impacts. The business world should look to business schools for solutions and not just credentials.

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…Rethinking what is the true scarcity their organizations are addressing in the age of AI

I’m grateful for… All the friends I made along the way.

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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