Town+Gown: NYC Collaboration with Gabelli School MSBA Students Turns City Data into Real-World Insights

Graduate | Mar 10, 2026 | Gabelli School of Business

Since 2014, the Gabelli School of Business has collaborated with Town+Gown: NYC, a city-wide research program in the built environment, resident at NYC’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC). Town+Gown provides opportunities for graduate students at New York schools to work on real NYC agency research needs. For Gabelli School graduate students, that has meant analyzing administrative data on public capital projects serving residents across the five boroughs and providing insights from the data.

This experiential learning opportunity was initially led by R.P. Raghupathi, PhD, and Aditya Saharia, PhD, professors at the Gabelli School. Students tackled numerous administrative data sets provided by city agencies, analyzing them to gain insights using data-driven methods. The project scopes varied with the data sets provided and students were able to build on prior projects’ insights to apply an array of analytical techniques. Student-led research within Town+Gown aims at providing research results that can help inform future policy and practice change. As the collaboration with Town+Gown has grown in scale, it also has served to strengthen the connection between the School and NYC government. For an early example of Gabelli School student engagement, visit Town+Gown – Business Analytics on Vimeo.

Jie Ren, PhD, associate professor and director of the MS in Business Analytics, currently leads the collaboration, helping to transform it into the three-credit Applied Analytics Project elective class. During fall 2025, the Gabelli School class project was with Town+Gown and the Mayor’s Office of Operations, which created and manages the City’s recently expanded public-facing Capital Projects Dashboard. Students analyzed citywide public capital project data from the Dashboard, which includes data for all agencies’ capital projects regardless of project cost. While the objective of the Dashboard is to provide the public with a snapshot three times each year of all capital projects, the data it captures is amenable to data analysis.

The expanded Dashboard data sets covered 2-1/3 years, and this class project represented the first time a comprehensive analysis has been done on the data captured by the Dashboard. Initially students joined and cleaned four large data sets, then organized and categorized it for analytical purposes. The data included cost and schedule indicators along a project phase continuum and also had a “reasons for delay” explanatory data field. Students organized the indicators as variables for analysis and created additional variables from those indicators. DDC staff presented to the class and later arranged field trips for the students at two active projects.

In December, the students presented the work to an audience that included Operations and City agency staff members in City Hall’s historic Council of the Whole conference room. Will Hsiao, manager of data systems and solutions at the Mayor’s Office of Operations, noted, “Transforming administrative data into insights is a significant challenge. The students successfully turned raw numbers into a structured analysis that deepens our understanding of the City’s capital projects.” Terri Matthews, director of Town+Gown: NYC remarked, “As always, we were delighted to work with students from Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, this year in the Applied Analytics Project class setting, which helped make a data analysis project of this magnitude possible to do.” The Gabelli School class project presentations are posted here: Town+Gown Working Groups: Construction Culture+Data (CCD).