Brad Sturt Named CBA Faculty of the Year
Brad Sturt
Brad Sturt, an Associate Professor of Business Analytics in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences, has been named UIC College of Business Administration (CBA) Faculty of the Year, a special recognition created for faculty nominated across the research and teaching categories whose achievements demonstrate excellence across more than one dimension.
“The students at UIC constantly amaze and inspire me,” Sturt says. “I care deeply about their success. I try not to overestimate my influence in their lives — I recognize that many students will succeed regardless of my involvement because they are smart and hardworking.” Still, he finds it especially rewarding when students tell him his class or advice helped them land a job they might not have otherwise gotten. Preparing students to find jobs and succeed in their careers, he believes, is what being a professor is all about.
Research: Optimizing for Trust and Impact
Sturt’s research centers on mathematical optimization, identifying real-world problems, from detecting voting machine misconfigurations to determining which products retailers should stock, and developing algorithms that find the best possible decisions within them.
His best-known work applies this lens to election security. Most U.S. votes are cast on paper ballots scanned and tabulated by voting machines, which can be accidentally or intentionally misconfigured in ways that swap votes between candidates. Sturt developed algorithms to efficiently test these machines and catch misconfigurations before they matter — work now deployed in real-world elections across Michigan. He’s also spun the research into a startup that has generated roughly $1.5 million in revenue since 2024.
Beyond election security, his research spans revenue management, including how companies decide which products to present to customers, and artificial intelligence, where his focus has increasingly turned to how human expertise can be elicited and effectively conveyed to AI systems.
Teaching: Building Companies in the Classroom
Sturt has brought that same experimental instinct to teaching. In Spring 2026, he launched IDS 494/594: Entrepreneurship with AI, a new course where student groups spent the semester launching an AI-powered startup from scratch, using AI to develop business ideas, build MVPs, reach and interview potential customers, and work through every stage of getting a company off the ground. Alongside weekly one-on-one meetings with Sturt, students connected with founders and venture capital investors he brought into the classroom throughout the semester. The course drew strong student evaluations and was later featured in an invited talk at Columbia Business School’s “The MBA Transformed? AI and Beyond” workshop.
What Drives Him
Sturt is drawn to work with real stakes, ambitious enough that failure is a genuine possibility. In research, that’s meant tackling brand-new territory like optimization for election security alongside foundational open questions in his field, such as nonparametric identification in assortment planning. In teaching, it’s meant experimenting with courses like his AI entrepreneurship class. “I am deeply appreciative of UIC Business for giving me the freedom and support to pursue these ideas,” he says.
Sturt is closely watching how AI continues to reshape both fields he works in, including the possibilities raised by recursively self-improving AI and artificial general intelligence. The pace of change can be unsettling, he says, but he’s optimistic about academia’s role in it and believes UIC is well-positioned to lead through both research and teaching.
Sturt joined the UIC faculty in 2020 and credits the department’s support since then, particularly Prof. Ali Tafti, the outgoing IDS department head, and Prof. Selva Nadarajah, the incoming department head. He also points to the many other faculty members he considers equally deserving of recognition.
Outside of work, Sturt is the father of three sons — ages two, four, and six — and spends most of his time with his family. He also travels frequently to speak at other universities and meet with government officials about his election-security research.