# Interview with Professor Eva Ascarza

![Eva Ascarza photo](/sites/default/files/styles/large_825px_wide/public/2026-08/ascarza_photo2_highres.jpg.webp?itok=9qgBK139)

**How did you become interested in marketing? What excites you about the field?**

It really started by accident. After I finished Math in college, I took an internship at a bank, and I landed in the CRM department (Customer Relationship Management). I'm not exaggerating when I say I didn't even know what "CRM" stood for on my first day. I had to go look it up. But once I was in it, I got hooked on something I hadn't expected: how much data companies were sitting on about their customers, and how little they actually understood from it. By the end of the internship, they offered me a job, but the nerd inside me won out, and I decided to apply to PhD programs in Marketing instead. What excites me about the field, still today, is that intersection — real human behavior on one side, rigorous quantitative modeling on the other, and the fact that getting it right (or wrong) has real consequences, for the business and for the people on the other end of it.

**What are your research interests and goals? What questions do you aim to answer through your research?**

I'm interested in how companies can manage customers better — and increasingly, how data and AI can help them do that responsibly. A lot of my early work centered on retention: why customers leave, how to keep the most valuable ones, and more recently, a lot of my research agenda has shifted toward personalization and targeting, with a real focus on making these systems both more effective and more trustworthy. I've worked on how to eliminate unintended bias in personalized policies, and more recently on what we call "protected heterogeneity," figuring out how much of an algorithmic score is really driven by protected attributes, and how to build scores that stay personalized without becoming discriminatory.

A big open question I keep coming back to is how to get targeting right when the signals we have are messy, delayed, or incomplete. That's pushed me toward work on using short-term signals more intelligently instead of relying on noisy long-term outcomes, designing experiments that are aware of the downstream decision they're meant to inform, and thinking about targeting in settings with real operational constraints, where helping one customer can create costs for others rather than existing in isolation. More recently, I've also gotten interested in what large language models can do for customer intelligence beyond prediction, from building richer customer representations to training agents that know when a conversation, like a sales call, isn't going anywhere and should be cut short.

I guess a way to summarize across all of it is: how do we build customer management tools that are accurate, fair, and actually usable by the people making decisions with them.

**What excites you most about joining the faculty at NYU Stern, and the Marketing Department in particular?**

Stern has amazing researchers across so many fields. It sits right in the heart of Greenwich Village, deeply embedded in New York's business and cultural life, but it also has this real global reach, with partnerships and programs all around the world. So you get both — a school that's genuinely local, rooted in one of the most dynamic business environments in the world, and genuinely global at the same time.

I've known the Marketing Department for a long time, and I'm delighted to finally be part of it. This is a fantastic group doing high-quality research across such a wide range of topics, and they're genuinely nice, normal people. I know that might sound like a strange thing to highlight, but it's not always so obvious among academics :)

**You're returning to NYC after being in Boston for the past eight years. What are you most looking forward to about being back in the Big Apple?**

I love being back. Plus, there's something about living in the Village that energizes me. NYC is the most diverse place I know, and that diversity is part of why I'm happy here. But it's not only diversity, it's access. Access to almost anything: any cuisine, any kind of art or performance, any community or subculture you want to find, any type of person you want to meet. Ironically, I'm from a small city in Spain (Pamplona), and that will always be home for me — yet I've always felt completely part of NYC when I'm here.

What I'm most looking forward to? Inexpensive Asian food on every corner, bagels with jalapeño spread, being able to walk almost everywhere.

**Where do your interests lie outside of academia and research? (hobbies, recreation, etc.) What do you do for fun and recreation?**

Concerts, mainly Spanish rock, are a big one for me. I already have tickets to quite a few concerts coming up over the next few months. I also love dance, watching it, not performing it! Everything from contemporary to more classic ballet. And in general I'm drawn to random cultural activities and exhibitions, even ones I don't know much about going in. Beyond that: climbing, sailing, and long walks around the city. I do go to the gym, but I wouldn't really call it a hobby if I'm honest, it's more a way of taking care of my future self, so she can keep having actual hobbies.