"We Are GSM" - Meet Assistant Professor Sebastian Calonico

When a hospital must decide whether to adopt a new treatment without knowing if it truly works, the choice cannot wait for perfect evidence. That moment of uncertainty is where Sebastian Calonico’s work begins.

An assistant professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, Calonico studies how organizations make high-stakes decisions when data is incomplete and the consequences are real. He develops new methodological tools that help evaluate policies, business strategies and medical interventions across different settings, translating complex analysis into practical guidance.

Labs to Lives

In federally funded research focused on preventing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, he and his team analyze large-scale health records in the United Kingdom and the United States to understand how preventive treatments such as statins and blood pressure control influence dementia risk. Using advanced causal methods and machine learning, they simulate strategies that could reduce cases, especially in underserved communities.

At UC Davis, his work moves data from the lab into everyday decisions that improve lives.

Video Transcript

How Organizations Adopt New Technologies
So, my research basically combines developing new methodological tools to explore ways to conduct cross-site inference, basically to evaluate the effect of interventions, public policies and business decisions and so on.

We are exploring how organizations incorporate new technologies, especially in the context in which they are not totally sure whether they work or not, but they need to make a decision about that. We are studying this in the context of health organizations, where they need to decide whether to apply or not a new medical intervention with this uncertainty. And basically, we explore the role of social learning, whether they use information from their peers who adopted this technology before and, based on how they perform after that, they make a decision to use it or not in the future.

Applying Methods Across Fields
Part of what I like about some of the projects I work on is developing new methodologies that can be applied broadly across fields. When you combine these technical tools with solving actual problems, that's something that can be applied both academically and by organizations, by people working in these organizations. If you make them in such a way that they can be used by people who might not be experts in the field, I think that's where I find it very rewarding to see how people use it and find it relevant to make decisions, to conduct different types of studies across firms and managerial levels, student levels and so on.

Teaching Data Analysis for Managers
I teach Data Analysis for Managers in the MBA program, and that's a core statistics class. I bring my passion for data analysis and try to transmit that to students in a similar way, in the sense that they don't need to have all these technical tools in order to do proper analysis of data and use data to make decisions. I think people might have this idea that they need to have all of this technical background to conduct a statistical analysis. What I try to highlight in this class is that you can do a lot with just some basic knowledge, simply by working on a problem that you care about. And this can actually be used in many areas of business.

I think that these days it is particularly important to get a business education. You need to have more training. The education that you would receive here, the type of training that you will receive, will expand your options in terms of what you can do. It will open new doors that maybe you didn’t even know existed.

Family Life in Davis
I enjoy most of my time outside of work with my two kids. They are two and seven years old, so you can imagine they take a lot of our time—my wife and I—but we actually enjoy it. Being here in Davis is something we particularly appreciate because it’s very much a family-friendly community. We try to enjoy this particular age, which I think is really nice to spend time with them.

We Are GSM.