{"id":96473,"date":"2025-09-18T14:11:26","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T18:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/?post_type=profile&#038;p=96473"},"modified":"2026-03-24T12:50:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T16:50:24","slug":"yolande-athaide","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/profile\/yolande-athaide\/","title":{"rendered":"Yolande Athaide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yolande Athaide is a visiting associate professor in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University\u2019s Metropolitan College. With over three decades of experience, she has a proven track record of leading business transformations and high-impact projects across financial, operational, and analytics domains. Her expertise spans data-driven strategy development, advanced analytics, and transformative process improvements powered by artificial intelligence (AI), with recent research focused on the evolving role of AI in higher education, consulting, and financial analytics.<\/p>\n<p>Ms. Athaide teaches courses in project management, quantitative and qualitative decision-making, finance, and risk analytics, with emphasis on real-world applications, ethical AI integration, critical decision-making, and developing career skills. Prior to her current appointment, she served as an analyst in finance and administration at Harvard University\u2019s Salata Institute for Climate &#038; Sustainability. Athaide also brings more than twenty years of entrepreneurial experience as the co-founding president and CEO of Cygnet Risk Group and EYE Numerics in Houston, Texas, along with expertise in financial derivatives tools for quantitative risk management from her days leading a team of risk analysts at EOTT Energy Corp. Throughout her career, she has successfully delivered sustainable value to her clients through complex projects, implemented data-driven compliance solutions, and guided AI research and development initiatives.<\/p>\n<p>Athaide is currently part of SOAR Management Consulting Group, a volunteer team of management consultants serving nonprofit organizations in Boston, Mass. Other volunteer work includes serving as a competition judge with Technovation Girls and as an executive board member and treasurer for the Mass Chapter of the Association for Women in STEM. She is a member of the State Bar of California and the CFA Institute and its Boston chapter.<\/p>\n<div class=\"bu_collapsible_container \" aria-live=\"polite\" data-customize-animation=\"false\"><h2 class=\"bu_collapsible\" aria-expanded=\"false\"tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\">Research Interests<\/h2><div class=\"bu_collapsible_section\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AI-driven risk management in complex environments<\/li>\n<li>Real options as a framework for strategic flexibility and value delivery<\/li>\n<li>Digital twins for real-time risk simulation<\/li>\n<li>Sustainable business practices<\/li>\n<li>Ethical and governance challenges for sustainability<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n<div class=\"bu_collapsible_container \" aria-live=\"polite\" data-customize-animation=\"false\"><h2 class=\"bu_collapsible\" aria-expanded=\"false\"tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\">Courses<\/h2><div class=\"bu_collapsible_section\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/p>\n<ul><div class=\"course-feed\"><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 515 \u2013 AI-Powered Project Management<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 516 \u2013 Project Leadership and Emerging Communication Technologies<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 632 \u2013 Financial Concepts<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 644 \u2013 Project Finance and Risk Analysis<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 715 \u2013 Quantitative and Qualitative Decision-Making<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>MET AD 782 \u2013 Project Value Strategies<\/li>\n<p><\/div><\/ul>\n<p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n<div class=\"bu_collapsible_container \" aria-live=\"polite\" data-customize-animation=\"false\"><h2 class=\"bu_collapsible\" aria-expanded=\"false\"tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\">Scholarly Works<\/h2><div class=\"bu_collapsible_section\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>Publications<\/strong><br \/>\nAthaide, Y., Athaide, C. &#8220;Leveraging Business Analytics in Consulting &#038; the Role of AI in the Future of Consulting.&#8221; In <em>Next Generation Entrepreneurship<\/em>, edited by Rajagopal, D., Goncalves, M., and Zlatev, V. Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (2026): 181\u2013206. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-031-98513-3_6\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-031-98513-3_6<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Padalkar, N., Athaide, Y., Abrahamson, A., et al. \u201cReimagining Business Analytics Laboratories for Reproducibility.\u201d Presented at the 4th EAI Conference on Computer Science and Education in Computer Science, 2025, and accepted for publication in the anthology <em>Computer Science and Education in Computer Science<\/em> (Springer, 2025). <\/p>\n<p><strong>Compilations<\/strong><br \/>\nAthaide, Y. <em>MET AD 516\u2014Project Leadership and Emerging Communications Technologies<\/em>. Cognella (2026).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Working Papers<\/strong><br \/>\nAthaide, Y. \u201cA Governance Framework for Ethics and Risk in Algorithmic Finance.\u201d Manuscript under development (2025).<\/p>\n<p>Athaide, Y., Athaide, C., and Padalkar, N. \u201cAI for financial misinformation and fraud detection in cryptocurrency markets: A case study on Ethereum and DeFi.\u201d Manuscript and machine learning analysis under development (2025).<\/p>\n<p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"author":2836,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/96473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2836"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/96473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98658,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/96473\/revisions\/98658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}