Marc Ruggiano

Marc Ruggiano (MBA ’96) holds a joint appointment from the School of Data Science and the Darden School of Business. He teaches in the M.S. in Data Science and the MBA programs, as well as in the M.S in Business Analytics program offered jointly by Darden and the McIntire School of Commerce.  His courses currently include Business Analytics, Customer Analytics, Marketing Leadership, and Healthcare Marketing.  

Ruggiano currently serves as inaugural director of the Darden-SDS Collaboratory for Applied Data Science (DCADS), an innovative collaboration between the two schools under the sponsorship of the UVA Office of the Provost that will serve as a vehicle to advance research and teaching efforts at the intersection of data science and business.

He has recently completed service as a visiting research scientist at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and as an associate fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previously, Ruggiano spent more than two decades in the corporate sector working primarily in technology and healthcare. Most recently, he was head of Customer Relationship Marketing and Management at Humana, a leading U.S. healthcare company. While at Humana, Ruggiano was responsible for managing a team of analytics, marketing, and technology experts that developed, delivered, and measured the impact of more than one billion health-related consumer interventions annually.

He began his business career with McKinsey & Company after serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy, where he was a flight instructor for the F-14 Tomcat, a graduate of the TOPGUN School, and a veteran of Operation Desert Storm.

Ruggiano’s research focuses on health and healthcare-related decision-making, and on the changing nature of organizational leadership in a data-saturated world.  His research on decision-making emphasizes experimental methods to understand individual and group choice behaviors, and design and test interventions that positively influence them.  He has presented his work on career choice among medical students at the American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Annual Meeting and the International Pathways to Medicine Workshop at WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

He holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the United States Naval Academy.