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 ubiquitous 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: (1) 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. (2) Dual-use industrial and cyber technologies – Investigating marketing’s interfaces with a range of ubiquitous technologies originally developed for defense applications (e.g., AI, cybersecurity, imaging, and geodata) and related industrial markets (e.g., sales lead nurturing, sales lead generation, marketing automation systems) that are now used for commercial use and consumer engagement. (3) 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. The Vaid Lab for Dual-use Technologies aligns cutting-edge research on dual-use industrial and cyber technologies with his undergraduate teaching in Marketing Analytics, graduate teaching in Synthetic Consumer Analytics (in the Master of Management in AI and Analytics program), and doctoral teaching in Causal Inference. Dr. Vaid's undergrad Marketing Analytics course (4MI3) is the first such undergraduate business course that directly integrates and studies the dual-use technology industry. 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 likewise went to grad school 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.