Professor Pinar Karaca-Mandic, PhD is the C. Arthur Williams Jr. Professor in Healthcare Risk Management in the Department of Finance at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and the Founding Director of the Business Advancement Center for Health (BACH). Prior to that, she served as the Academic Director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI) from 2017 to 2021. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in Health Economics and Healthcare programs. She co-founded the University of Minnesota COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking project in March 2020 in an effort to collect and disseminate daily data on COVID-19 hospitalizations, ICU and ventilator use across all U.S. states and sub-state geographies. For her work on the project, Dr. Karaca-Mandic received the 2021 Women’s Health Leadership Trust award for Community Engagement. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of California at Berkeley, and BA in economics and mathematics (high honors), and a concentration in public policy from Swarthmore College.