Academic Areas Operations Management Faculty and Research

Operations Management Faculty

At Booth, our faculty have the freedom to incorporate emerging topics and their own research into the curriculum and the courses they teach.

In experiential courses such as the Healthcare Analytics Lab, students learn to apply data-driven analytics and insights to identify and create health-care delivery efficiencies. Student teams work on real-world improvement projects with prominent health-care institutions.

Other courses such as Managerial Decision Modeling and Advanced Decision Models with Python provide students with hands-on active learning through in-class cases and a term project that applies the tools and frameworks learned in the course to a business problem.

Discover more about our operations management faculty, including the classes they teach, below.

Operations Management Faculty in the News

The US Forced Major Manufacturers to Build Ventilators. Now They’re Piling Up Unused in a Strategic Reserve.
August 18, 2020 | Washington Post
The United States ordered double the number of ventilators needed in the worst-case scenario, which involved no equipment sharing between states and drew from the strategic national stockpile, said Booth’s Dan Adelman.

As Virus Flares Globally, New Strategies Target Hot Spots
October 19, 2020 | Associated Press
Booth’s John R. Birge and Ozan Candogan have been modeling how localized restrictions in New York City could best minimize both infections and economic harm.

Retail Chains Face Uphill Battle Getting Shoppers Back in Stores
May 02, 2020 | The Hill
As major retailers start to reopen, they face the challenge of convincing consumers it’s safe to make purchases in person. Booth’s Nicole DeHoratius suggests appointment shopping could be an effective approach. “It allows one to minimize contact with others and it helps with the track-and-trace process should there be that need,” she said.

Partnering across the University of Chicago and Beyond

Our operations management faculty members are active in and outside of the University of Chicago, from participating in events with industry leaders on how to lead through a pandemic, to delivering keynotes at top conferences in this area, to editing top journals. Here are just a few examples:

• Dan Adelman is an area editor for Operations Research, the flagship journal of the field, and he is a co-director of the Healthcare Initiative at Booth.
• John R. Birge is editor-in-chief of Operations Research, is a part of the Science Advisory Council with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and is chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society.
• René Caldentey is chair of the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section and department editor of the Revenue Management and Marketplace Design.
• Nicole DeHoratius is UChicago Scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.
• Varun Gupta collaborates with a third-party logistics startup, Convoy, as a Convoy scholar on operational questions arising in freight marketplaces, such as inventory repositioning and auction design.
• Rad Niazadeh has worked on learning theory and auctions at Microsoft and Yahoo.
• Linwei Xin is involved in a project with a leading Chinese e-retailer that is building matching algorithms for robots in unmanned warehouses.

Research Spotlight

Discover some of the latest working papers and published papers from our operations management faculty.

“Thousands Of Lives Could Be Saved In The US During The COVID-19 Pandemic If States Exchanged Ventilators”
Dan Adelman

“Controlling Epidemic Spread: Reducing Economic Losses with Targeted Closures”
John R. Birge and Ozan Candogan, with coauthor Yiding Feng (Northwestern University)

“Impact of Task-Level Worker Specialization, Workload, and Product Personalization on Consumer Returns”
Amy Ward, with coauthors Hailong Cui (Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota), and Sampath Rajagopalan (University of Southern California)

“Regularized Online Allocation Problems: Fairness and Beyond”
Haihao (Sean) Lu, with Santiago R. Balseiro (Columbia University) and Vahab Mirrokni (Google Research)

See Our Other Academic Areas

Accounting  Behavioral Science  Econometrics and Statistics  Entrepreneurship  Finance  Macroeconomics  Marketing  Microeconomics  Operations Management  Organizations and Markets  Strategy and Leadership