Dr. Lara Khansa is the Sonny Merryman Professor in Business and the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.

Dr. Khansa joined Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2019. She was named the Sonny Merryman Professor in Business in June 2020. Khansa took on her current role as Associate Dean for undergraduate programs in 2017.

As Associate Dean, Dr. Khansa provides leadership and direction to the academics of undergraduate education, including through enhancing the college's core undergraduate curriculum and enrollment management process. She currently leads a team of 21 advisors, educators, and mentors in developing and implementing initiatives related to student recruiting, and academic and career success and engagement in the college's areas of focus: business intelligence & analytics; innovation and entrepreneurship; security, privacy & trust; and the human condition.

Khansa has taught numerous undergraduate courses in business statistics, global operations and information technology, and enterprise resource planning. She has also developed and taught courses in health care information technology and health care data management in the online Master of Information Technology program. In these courses, Khansa teaches her students about the importance of data quality to patient care and safety and provides them with hands-on skills to evaluate and improve the quality of health care processes. In 2015, Dr. Khansa was selected by President Tim Sands to serve on the steering committee for the Envisioning Virginia Tech-Beyond Boundaries initiative and to co-chair a study group on discovering new funding models, one of four thematic areas identified as central to the university's advancement as a global land-grant leader.

She received a Ph.D. in information systems, M.S in Electrical & Computer Engineering, and M.B.A in Finance & Investment Banking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BS in Computer & Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Prior to pursuing her doctoral degree, Dr. Khansa worked as a software design engineer at GE Medical Systems designing and implementing medical applications and connectivity tools at the company's global software platform facility in Wisconsin. Her research is in the areas of human-computer interaction, online behavioral economics, information privacy and security, healthcare analytics, and healthcare policy and societal disparities in access to healthcare. She has published over 50 refereed journal articles and conference proceedings in premier operations management, information systems, and medical research outlets including in the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, Computers & Operations Research, etc., and in leading medical journals such as Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery and Aesthetic Surgery.

Research Interests

Human-computer interaction (affective, social, and relational); human behavioral economics (psychoanalytic social theories); online behavioral analytics (nomological psychology); social commerce; B2B e-Marketplaces; integrated online security, online information privacy, security and resilience of IT information infrastructures. Healthcare analytics, including systematic healthcare analytics, financial healthcare analytics, and social media analytics in healthcare.

Experience

Ph.D., Information Systems, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 2008
MBA, Finance and Investment Banking, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 2003
M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 2000
B.S., Computer and Communication Engineering (With Distinction), American University of Beirut, 1998