Hengchen Dai, Ph.D.

About

Hengchen Dai is an Associate Professor of Organization Behavior and Behavioral Decision Making at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She collaborates with diverse organizations to conduct field studies that explore the drivers of motivation and develop scalable behavioral interventions. 

Dr. Dai has a particular interest in improving decision making in the healthcare context on both the patient and physician sides. Her research related to the healthcare setting has been published in prestigious social science journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behavior, Management Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, as well as medical journals such as JAMA-Cardiology, Preventive Medicine, and American Journal of Health Promotion. Dr. Dai’s work has garnered extensive media coverage, featuring in major outlets including The Financial Times, Forbes, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Freakonomics. 

Dr. Dai co-directs the UCLA Nudge Unit with Dr. Richard Leuchter. She also serves as a Senior Editor at Organization Science.

Among her numerous accolades, Hengchen is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a recipient of the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. She has been recognized as one of the “World’s 40 Best B-School Professors Under 40” by Poets & Quants and has received multiple teaching and research awards at UCLA.