OSU business analytics teams place 1st, 2nd at University of South Carolina competition
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Media Contact: Stephen Howard | Manager of Communications | 405-744-4363 | stephen.howard@okstate.edu
Business analytics graduate students at Oklahoma State University have developed a habit of excelling in case competitions.
This time, the students had two causes for celebration.
OSU teams won first and second place at the University of South Carolina’s Big Data Health Science Student Case Competition from Feb. 7-9, adding to a recent influx of awards for the highly ranked master’s in business analytics and data science (MS BAnDS) program.
Sunanda Sen, Moumita Sen, Kusuma Lanka and Debanik Chakraborty placed first, securing a $5,000 prize. Medha Haldar, Carol Antony and Harish Palakurthi won $3,000 as the runners-up. Winners are honored Feb. 13 at the National Big Data Health Science Conference in Columbia, South Carolina.
“I am incredibly proud of our MS BAnDS students who worked hard to secure both first and second place in this prestigious national competition,” said Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, MS BAnDS program director. “This is the third time in the last five years that we have placed in the top three, and it is a testament to our students’ skills and abilities and the dedication of our faculty in educating them.”
The competition is open to graduate students and senior undergraduate students, who apply their analytics skills to big datasets in health care. All participants work with the same business problem and data, detailing their solutions in original PowerPoint presentations and executive summaries. This year, they developed predictive models to identify optimal antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens for achieving key clinical milestones in HIV treatment and closing the treatment gap through data-driven decisions.
“This competition taught me how to bridge the gap between data-driven modeling and practical implementation in real-world health care scenarios,” Sunanda Sen said. “I learned the importance of balancing model accuracy with interpretability to ensure clinical adoption, while also refining my ability to work under time pressure and present actionable insights effectively.”
Thirty-nine teams participated from 27 universities across the United States, including Yale University, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Duke University, Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University. Seven teams advanced to the finals with a Duke team placing third.
“Competition is embedded in the DNA of the MS BAnDS program at Oklahoma State,” Haldar said. “Under the leadership of our program director, Dr. Chakraborty, we are actively encouraged to participate in competitions like this, gaining exposure to high-pressure problem solving, interdisciplinary collaboration and the ability to tailor our presentations for both technical and non-technical audiences.”
The accolades reflect an outstanding school year for the MS BAnDS program, which is ranked by Fortune as the No. 2 master’s in data science program in the nation, behind only Harvard University.
The four students who won the South Carolina competition previously placed third at the Humana-Mays Healthcare Analytics Case Competition in November 2024. Also in November, an MS BAnDS team claimed a national championship at Purdue University’s Data 4 Good Case Competition, analyzing data to provide support for bereaved military families. Additionally, MS BAnDS students won two Best Presentation awards at the 2024 MidWest SAS Users Group Conference.
Visit the Spears Business website to learn more about the award-winning MS BAnDS program.