Michael Braun is the Homer A. Burnell (1928) Career Development Professor, and Assistant Professor of Management Science (Marketing Group), at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The core of his research program is in finding complex and interesting data structures in business and marketing contexts; constructing and estimating probability models to "tell a story" about the underlying customer behavior; and using those models to address practical marketing and management issues. He has written on, spoken on, and taught about applications of probability models to marketing and business problems as diverse as forecasting, customer retention, customer lifetime value, marketing ROI, social networking models, segmentation and targeting strategies, real-time customization of website design, and how customers decide to file insurance claims. In short, he continues the long MIT Sloan tradition of focusing on managerial relevance and rigorous technique in the academic study of marketing, statistics and management.

Professor Braun is also interested more generally in Bayesian statistical modeling, and in particular nonparametric Bayesian models and alternative, efficient Bayesian estimation methods. For 2011, he was elected the Chairperson of the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics and Marketing, after having served as the section's Program Chair in 2009. His work has been published in top academic publications such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, and Marketing Science. In 2010, his paper on "Website Morphing," (co-authored with MIT colleagues John Hauser, Gui Liberali and Glen Urban), was a finalist for the prestigious John D. C. Little Award, which is awarded to the best marketing article published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal. His paper on "Modeling the ‘Pseudodeductible' in Insurance Claims Decisions" (co-authored with University of Pennsylvania mentors Howard Kunreuther, Pete Fader and Eric Bradlow) was the winner of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Best Student Paper Award in 2006.

In 2010, Professor Braun launched a new class at MIT: Customer Analytics Using Probability Models. His educational objective is to train the next generation of business leaders on how to analyze and interpret marketing data to address real-world managerial problems. He takes a hands-on approach with the class, believing that managers cannot effectively act on the volumes of customer data that they collect, unless they master a foundational set of quantitative, statistical tools. By the end of the class, not only can students develop their own cutting-edge probability models from scratch, but also they can evaluate a broader class of statistical analyses, with confidence and a critical eye. This class gives students a competitive edge in the marketplace, where the exploitation of data and information often is a determining factor in business success. He also teaches the introductory MBA class on Marketing Management, where students learn very quickly to leave any preconceptions of marketing as a "soft" discipline at the bottom of the Charles River.

Michael Braun earned his Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an A.B. with Honors in Economics from Princeton University, and an M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Before entering academia, he worked on the development and deployment of broadband Internet products for such companies as Comcast, Marcus Cable and Charter Communications. From 1999 to 2002, he was Vice President for Global Affiliate Operations of Chello Broadband, the Amsterdam-based Internet arm of United Pan-Europe Communications. An avid sports fan, he also worked as a production assistant at ESPN, and as a researcher for NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. His bike rides to work are short hops, compared to his past rides up the west coast of Newfoundland, though Slovakia from Budapest to Krakow, and across Switzerland from Geneva to St. Gallen. And he remains convinced that air conditioning is the World's Greatest Invention.