Dr. Pradip Kumar Bala served as Director In-Charge and Dean(Academics) at IIM Ranchi. He was also member in the Board of Governors of IIM Ranchi. He has also served as Chairperson, PGP and Doctoral Programme & Research at IIM Ranchi. He has been in academics for more than 20 years after his industrial and systems engineering experience in TATA Steel. His teaching, research and publication areas include Data Mining Techniques with applications in various business domains, Text Mining using NLP, Recommender Systems, Social Media Analytics, Marketing Intelligence & Marketing Analytics. He has great respect for the spirit of learning in any individual. He has more than 130 research publicatios on data mining applications, NLP, marketing analytics and recommender systems in reputed international jounals, conference proceedings and book chapters. He also serves as reviewer to many reputed international journals.Many MDPs/Training Programmes have been conducted by him in the area of business analytics and business intelligence.