Lan Nguyen Chaplin is a consumer researcher and marketing professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She comes from a Vietnamese refugee family and is a first-generation college student. She has 20 years of experience in higher education and was featured as one of Poets & Quants’ Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors in the World. To share the news with her students, she sported bright pink hair and posted the news on LinkedIn.
She has taught at the Villanova University, University of Arizona, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was also head coach of the Illinois women’s lacrosse club team. She has also been a visiting research scholar at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Lan conducts research in the areas of children’s consumer happiness, materialism, and branding. She has received global media attention from TIME, Forbes, The New York Times, Fortune, Esquire Magazine, ABC news radio, CBS news, The Atlantic, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Parenting, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Psychology Today, Spotify, and Glamour.
Although she is not a Reddit user, Lan found out one day from her undergraduate students that her research on gratitude and materialism received 40,000+ votes (86% upvotes) and 1.4K comments on Reddit (November 2018) and was the top trending post in r/science and psychology threads in the first hour.
Lan is actively involved in her community. She is a member of the University of Pennsylvania alumni program. She is the founder of QuanTâm, a non-profit that helps undergraduate students and young professionals develop personally and professionally through community service and civic engagement. Lan also serves on the Partners Advisory Council at Cradles to Crayons (Chicago), and organization that provides low-income and homeless children receive daily essentials. Finally, she serves on the Leadership Council for CIS of Chicago, an organization that provides students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life.