Vishal Gupta

Vishal Gupta is an Associate Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business. He holds courtesy appointments in USC Viterbi’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Department and is an affiliate faculty member at USC’s Center for AI and Society. His research focuses on data-driven decision-making and optimization in scarce data environments, with applications in healthcare, education, AI, and revenue management. He has received prestigious awards including the Wagner Prize and Pierskalla Best Paper Prize. Gupta earned a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy (Yale University, Magna Cum Laude) and completed Part III of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge. Before academia, he worked as a quantitative analyst at Barclays Capital.

His research emphasizes high-stakes decision-making scenarios like precision healthcare and disaster response, where data scarcity is common. He has published extensively on topics such as decision-aware learning, reinforcement learning for public health, and small-data optimization strategies. Gupta serves as an associate editor for Management Science, MSOM, and Operations Research, and leads the USC Summer Scholars Program in Operations Management and Data Science.

Key achievements include deploying the Eva system in Greece for targeted COVID-19 testing, which used reinforcement learning to optimize testing allocations. His work bridges theoretical optimization with practical applications, emphasizing interpretable analytics for societal impact. He teaches courses on AI ethics, stochastic foundations of decision-making, and research methodologies.