Dr. Sash Vaid

Biography

Research Interests: Political Economy of Marketing; Dual-use Industrial and Cyber Technologies; Exogenous Shocks (e.g. regulatory, policy actions); Marketing Interfaces. Dr. Sash Vaid is a tenured Associate Professor of Marketing at the DeGroote School of Business and an Affiliate Faculty with the School of Computational Science and Engineering at McMaster University. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Michigan. Dr. Vaid has extensive expertise in econometrics and quantitative marketing of industrial and cyber technologies, many with dual-use applications. His research interest in marketing interfaces can be visualized as a “Vaid Venn Diagram” with three circles intersecting across: A. Political economy of marketing – Attending to the regulatory and institutional contexts impacting firms, as well as dual-use industrial and cyber technology supply and acceptance. B. Dual-use industrial and cyber technologies – Investigating marketing’s interfaces with a range of technologies originally developed for defense applications (e.g., AI, cybersecurity, imaging, and geodata) and industrial markets (e.g., sales lead nurturing, sales lead generation, marketing automation systems) that are now used for commercial use and consumer engagement. C. Exogenous shocks at macro (regulatory) and micro (firm) levels – Exploring how these shocks influence marketing interfaces, which often lie along two dimensions that are somewhat intrinsic and extrinsic to the firm, specifically – functional and technological. Dr. Vaid is currently leveraging field experiments to investigate ways to quantify cyber-driven consumption by exploring agentic software engineering and development across a mix of general-purpose and functional/scripting languages (e.g., SQL, Python, Java, C++, CSS, and R, among others). The technological dimension of Dr. Vaid's research frequently informs his teaching. He teaches Marketing Analytics to undergraduates, Synthetic Consumer Analytics to graduate students (in the Master of Management in AI and Analytics program), and Causal Inference to PhD students. Dr. Vaid is also co-leading the development of Canada’s 1st Sales & Data Science Lab at the McLean Centre for Collaborative Discovery. The lab will train students via high-performance computing and data systems, visualization, data analysis, collaboration tools, and deep learning hardware. Dr. Vaid received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston and an MBA degree from Duke University in North Carolina. He has likewise attained graduate education at Rice University in Texas and at the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State University in Pennsylvania. He publishes his research in top-tier outlets. Dr. Vaid sees Canada and the United States as his intellectual home.