Alix Barasch
Professor
Alix Barasch has lived and taught in some of the world’s greatest cities—New York, Macau, Paris—so sometimes, it’s difficult to explain her new Boulder home to friends.
“I describe Boulder as a destination, even though it’s this livable, fun place,” Alix said. “We have all the good stuff that cities have, and then all the outdoors opportunities that go with it.”
She doesn’t describe herself as an outdoors person—“at least not yet,” she amended—but Leeds was a school she was interested in from afar, given the strength of the babyֱapp in the marketing department. For CU Boulder, however, the challenge in landing Barasch was twofold—prying her away from INSEAD and Paris, then doing the same for her partner, Amit Bhattacharjee.
“We both kind of saw CU as the perfect balance of prestigious university in combination with a desirable place to have a family and live and grow up,” she said. “It’s one of those places we had our eyes on.”
“Research is fun, but … when you think about where your work really makes a difference, that’s definitely in the classroom.”
Professor Alix Barasch
At Boulder, Alix has already had the chance to make a name for herself through her research, but ask her about top accomplishments and she instead talks about her love for teaching. While at NYU Stern, she was named among the 40 under 40 best business professors (“which I enjoyed, because it announced to everyone that I was under 40,” she said) and earned a similar recognition from Poets&Quants, a blog covering business school news.
“I’m proud of that because I think as professors, teaching is where a lot of our impact is,” she said. “Research is fun, but it takes forever to get something out, so when you think about where your work really makes a difference, that’s definitely in the classroom.”
Approachable research insights
In addition to being a hit in the classroom, her research is also very approachable, even for an undergraduate audience. Alix specializes in the interplay between consumer behavior and technology, which has taken her work in some interesting directions, like photography (such as how taking pictures on your vacation affects your memories of that trip and those experiences) and the wave of mobile apps, services and games that use streaks to nudge you to learn a language, play a game or go for a run.
Like many researchers, her work is grounded in her own experiences. Alix started studying streaks when she was logging new beers in the Untappd app, and got interested in photo taking when she was snapping pictures as a Fulbright scholar in Hong Kong.
“When I was taking photos of my experiences, it affected how much I enjoyed the moments, it affected my memories afterwards in terms of revisiting the photos,” Alix said. “I thought how interesting it was that a point-and-shoot camera could change the entire experience. That’s how I first started thinking about how technology is changing how much we get immersed in our environments, and how we choose to engage with the world around us.”
Her streaks research was recently published, and she’s now taking a look at other applications, such as the idea of a hot hand in a basketball free-throw shooter or a poker player.
“There’s been a little work on this already,” Alix said. “People think they get hot, but there’s very little evidence those streaks are real.”