Nilofar Varzgani

Nilofar Varzgani is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers Business School. She holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from Rutgers University and a B.B.A. in Finance from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. A Fulbright Scholar, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in data science and business analytics for more than a decade, including at La Salle University, where she was a tenured Associate Professor in the Business Systems and Analytics department before returning to Rutgers in 2025.

Her research sits at the intersection of business analytics, artificial intelligence, and operations management, with work in decision sciences, machine learning, text analytics, sentiment analysis, and stochastic modeling. Her current projects examine how generative AI interacts with business and educational settings, including the evaluation of AI vulnerabilities in quantitative business courses and the modernization of analytics instruction. Her scholarship has appeared in outlets such as Leisure Sciences, Decision Analytics Journal, the International Journal of Systems Science: Operations & Logistics, and Sage Business Cases, and she presents regularly at INFORMS and other leading conferences. Prior to academia, she was a Senior Analyst in Procurement and Analytics Solutions at Kearney, where she applied optimization and dynamic programming methods to sourcing and procurement challenges for corporate clients.

At Rutgers, Dr. Varzgani serves as Course Coordinator for Business Research Methods and is a member of the University Senate and the Newark Undergraduate Policy Committee. She was selected as a Fellow in the Fall 2026 cohort of the New Jersey AI Hub's Faculty Futures AI Studio and developed a learning module for the school's Responsible Agentic AI Certificate. Committed to experiential learning, she has coached several undergraduate teams in analytics competitions, guiding them to the Judges' Award for Excellence at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Student Data Viz Championship and the Best Poster award at the Manhattan University Business Analytics Competition. Her contributions have been recognized with the MSIS Department's Faculty Service Recognition Award (2025–26) and the Lindback Emerging Scholar Award (2022).