Preethika Sainam

Preethika Sainam teaches quantitative marketing classes that enhance the analytical piece of the students’ experience at Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU. She developed her passion for analytic decision making early in her career as a banquet sales manager for Sheraton Hotels and Resorts in India. Personal computers were a new tool for non-IT businesses at the time, and Sainam seized the opportunity. “That job helped me identify my love for data mining in large datasets to help understand customer preferences and sales trends, which ultimately led to my Ph.D.,” she says.

Sainam says these techniques are now ubiquitous in everyday business. The goal of her teaching is to help students understand and apply statistical techniques to improve the quality of managerial decisions. Her Analytic Decision Making course starts with basic statistics and moves on to cover frequently used managerial models. Her Big Data course provides an applied overview of the topic, including the role of sophisticated analytics used across business decision making (in finance, marketing, operations etc.). Her classes incorporate mini cases and hands-on learning activities so students have a mastery of the statistical techniques they learn. “They see how to use them in real-world business settings,” she says. Dr. Sainam also inserts humor into her lectures, something she learned by watching her father prepare for the lectures he delivered as a Medical College professor. “Given that I teach relatively dry quantitative classes, I have heard from many students that they love these group break out activities and humor breaks,” she says.

Prior to joining Thunderbird’s full-time faculty, Sainam served as chief marketing officer for a startup in Portland, Oregon. In this capacity she helped craft the firm’s marketing strategy so it could procure funding from angel investors. Earlier she was an assistant professor at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she engaged in scholarly research and taught marketing research.

Dr. Sainam earned a doctorate in marketing and a master’s degree in economics from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She also holds a master’s degree in management information sciences and an master's in business administration from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her undergraduate degree is from Purdue University, where she was a Dean’s Scholar.

Her research has been published in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, the top publications in Marketing and MIS, among others. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and eating her way through the world with her two daughters.