Student Competitions
Business Analytics Competition
Manhattan University hosts the Business Analytics Competition & Conference each spring through the O’Malley School of Business. This annual event brings together undergraduate students in business analytics and related fields to apply their skills in real-world scenarios. Teams analyze complex datasets, develop insights, and present data-driven recommendations in a competitive setting. The competition challenges students to combine technical analysis with strategic thinking, strengthening their ability to support effective business decision-making.
The 2026 Business Analytics Competition registration is now closed.
Student Teams
- The competition is open to undergraduate student teams consisting of two to four members.
- Each team member must be enrolled in an undergraduate program at the accredited higher education institution that the team member will represent.
- Each team needs to have a faculty advisor from their home institution.
- Student teams will register for the competition under the name of their faculty advisor.
- All participating students are expected to present their work during the conference to receive the participation certificates.
Competition Format
The competition features two phases. In both phases, student teams analyze a competition-specific dataset to develop business insights.
Phase One:
- Data and questions for Phase One will be released to registered teams on February 2, 2026.
- Teams will work at their home institutions to analyze the dataset and develop solutions.
- Each team must prepare and submit a poster summarizing their analysis by May 4, 2026.
- Teams will present their posters during the conference poster session on Monday, May 18, 2026, attended by faculty judges and participants.
Phase Two:
- On May 19, additional research questions and data will be distributed to all teams.
- Teams will use the day to analyze the data and prepare a presentation for the final judging round on May 20.
Awards
The top three teams will be recognized during the award ceremony and will receive monetary awards:
- First Place: $5,000
- Second Place: $2,500
- Third Place: $1,000
Additional teams will be recognized as honorable mentions.
Judging
Faculty advisors attending the conference will constitute the set of Phase One (Poster Session) judges.
Phase One scores will be based on the ratings given by faculty advisors (advisors will not be asked to evaluate their own team).
The presentations in Phase Two of the competition will be evaluated by a panel of practitioners representing various industries who value business analytics.
A team’s overall score will be determined by a combination of their Phase One and Phase Two scores.
Keynote Speaker
Randy Anderson
Randy I. Anderson is the director of the real estate programs at the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, where he leads program development and industry engagement. Anderson teaches courses in real estate finance and investments. He is an internationally recognized scholar and practitioner in real estate, with a research focus on real estate investment trusts (REIT), private and public real estate solutions, and portfolio construction.
Anderson has played a pivotal role in shaping real estate education across the country, having helped establish and lead programs at Florida International University, the University of Central Florida, and Baruch College. He held Eminent Scholar Chairs at FIU and UCF, served as academic director of the William Newman Real Estate programs at Baruch, and was the first William Newman Chair of Real Estate.
In the private sector, Anderson was co-founder and CEO of Griffin Capital Asset Management Company, where he launched and managed the Griffin Institutional Access Real Estate Fund and the Griffin Institutional Access Credit Fund. These funds, now part of Apollo Global Management, represent innovative approaches to democratizing institutional real estate investing. He also served as a partner in real assets at Apollo, CEO and chairman of the board for the Real Estate Interval Fund, and co-CEO and board member of Apollo’s non-traded REIT.
Before joining Griffin, Anderson held senior roles at Bluerock Real Estate LLC, Prudential, Marcus & Millichap and CNL. He is a former executive director of the American Real Estate Society, a Kinnard Young Scholar Award recipient, and has served as co-editor of both the Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management and the Journal of Real Estate Literature.
Anderson earned his Ph.D. in finance as a Presidential Fellow from the University of Alabama and holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from North Central College.
2026 Judges
Tabish Azeem
Tabish Azeem specializes in strategic analytics, applying advanced quantitative methods to inform high-stakes organizational decisions across the public, academic and corporate sectors. As a senior manager of business intelligence at Box, he serves as a trusted advisor to senior executives, developing analytical frameworks that drive decisions on customer retention, revenue growth and product adoption.
Before joining Box, Azeem was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he advised C-suite executives at Fortune 500 and public-sector clients on enterprise transformations. Previously, he was a strategy analyst and Swensen Fellow at Yale University, where his data-driven analyses informed major institutional policy decisions.
Earlier in his career, he served as a Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellow with the Government of India. He holds a master’s degree from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree from NIT Trichy.
Kendall Drew
Kendall Drew is a consulting account director at Microsoft, where she leads strategic engagements with enterprise customers to drive digital and AI-enabled transformation. She works with business and technology leaders to design and deliver high-impact solutions aligned to critical priorities.
As part of her role, Drew leads Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineering sales motion in the Americas, accelerating the adoption of innovative, custom-built solutions that unlock new business value. She joined Microsoft in 2017 and has held roles spanning solution design, consulting and customer strategy.
Prior to Microsoft, Drew led product and engineering teams for Levy Restaurants, a subsidiary of Compass Group. She holds a B.S. in industrial engineering and economics from Northwestern University and an MBA from Cornell Tech.
Lydia Manikonda
Lydia Manikonda is an assistant professor at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on building robust, goal-driven AI systems that learn from complex, real-world web data, with applications in privacy, public health and finance.
Her work examines how generative AI is reshaping human behavior, privacy norms and mental health, and how these shifts impact institutions such as higher education. Her research also includes developing interpretable AI systems that support metacognition rather than replace it.
Manikonda received her Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University.
Nneka Penniston
Nneka J. Penniston is a data science and analytics leader with more than 15 years of experience across pharmaceutical, healthcare, financial services and education organizations, including Bristol Myers Squibb and Citibank. She specializes in predictive modeling, natural language processing and generative AI.
She is currently developing FashionIQ, a multi-agent analytics system that uses crewAI and the Anthropic API to analyze fashion retail data. Penniston holds a Master of Science in Business Analytics from NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.
Since 2018, she has served as adjunct associate faculty at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, where she has mentored more than 500 graduate students in applied analytics, machine learning and AI. She is the author of CODE FASHIONABLY: Fashion Analytics and Machine Learning for Business Impact.
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson is vice president of industry strategy for health plans at DXC Technology. In this role, he is responsible for the formation and execution of the company’s commercial health plan segment vision through technology innovation, implementation and strategy execution.
He also served as a regional director of underwriting for commercial healthcare products in 15 markets across the United States. Thompson graduated from Fairfield University with a B.A. in economics and from the University of Connecticut with an MBA in marketing and finance.
Shantam Mogali
Shantam Mogali is a senior data engineer whose career spans roles at technology companies including Google, Amazon and Dell. He specializes in hyperscale data systems and complex ETL ecosystems, working at the forefront of modern data strategy to build products used by millions worldwide.
His work focuses on integrating applied AI with large-scale data engineering to address complex data analytics challenges. Through his career, Mogali has contributed to the ongoing evolution of data engineering practices across the technology industry.
Sam Meldrum
Sam Meldrum has a background in both business and technology, with more than 15 years of industry experience. He has worked with a range of companies to develop and implement data-driven commercial strategies, including predictive modeling and customer behavior insights.
In his current role as global client director at Salesforce, Meldrum works directly with one of the company’s strategic customers in the health and life sciences space. He is responsible for developing solutions to support commercial projects globally.
Meldrum holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Delaware and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.