Aboozar Hadavand received his Ph.D. from City University of New York (CUNY,) Graduate Center and his M.A. in Economics from Texas Tech University. Prior to Minerva, Hadavand served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he studied how students learn through massive open online courses (MOOCs.) Hadavand’s primary research focus is on the economics of labor force and higher education. He is currently researching the new economy, also known as a shared or gig economy, focusing on skill acquisition, gender discrimination, income inequality, and workers unions.

Hadavand has previously taught at Barnard College of Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Texas Tech University. He has also been the curriculum developer and lead of a program called Cloud-Based Data Science (CBDS) in Baltimore. The goal of CBDS is to train and prepare disadvantaged young adults for jobs in the field of data science.