Brett PuetzGraduate Student

I am a PhD student in the Consumer Behavior & Family Economics program. My current research interests include the cognitive processes that impact consumer decision-making and the outcomes of those decisions. I am interested in research into the application of prospect theory and time discounting in financial decisions. I am currently working with Professors Ashton and Wong on a project about how the application process for the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program affects its enrollment rate. I will be working on efforts to develop a web-crawling tool using machine learning techniques to gather information about the SSDI application process through social media sites, with the end goal of turning this into actionable information for the U.S. Social Security Administration.

I graduated from Purdue University with a BS in applied physics. I have worked as a software systems engineer for over 10 years, where I developed and implemented software automation tools and dealt with the interactions of complex systems. I worked with large amounts of data to isolate trends and troubleshoot issues.