How Businesses Should Use Crowdvoting
Booth’s René Caldentey developed a model to help businesses pinpoint the optimal time to end a crowdvoting campaign.
Academic Areas Operations Management Faculty and Research
The operations management faculty at Chicago Booth are generating research insights with global impact.
Recent research from professors Dan Adelman and Veronika Ročková, for example, highlights flaws in the most influential hospital-rating systems, impacting millions of people and billions of dollars.
Other research from our faculty in this area has examined a broad spectrum of operations management issues—from health-care analytics to operational issues in the criminal justice system to improving medical research through math.
The research from our operations management faculty is published regularly in many of the leading journals in this field, including Operations Research. From the Washington Post to The Hill, international media outlets often write about the research our operations management professors generate, including insights into the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
Featured Research in Chicago Booth Review
Discover some of the latest research from our operations management professors.
Hospital Ratings Are Deeply Flawed. Can They Be Fixed?
Booth’s Dan Adelman and Veronika Ročková investigate ways to improve one of the most influential hospital-rating systems.
Secrets of Wait Loss
As life moves faster, everyone’s patience is wearing thin. Who gets to the head of the line quickest?
Awards and Honors
Dan Adelman
Best Paper in Public Sector Operations Research, INFORMS, 2020.
Baris Ata
Wickham Skinner Best Paper Award, POMS, 2019.
John R. Birge
Harold Larnder Prize, Canadian Operational Research Society, 2018.
Donald D. Eisenstein
INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Best Paper Award, 2012.
Varun Gupta
MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award (with Luyi Yang and Laurens Debo), 2020.
Linwei Xin
INFORMS Applied Probability Society Best Publication Award, 2019.
Research with Impact
“The US military has the requisite expertise: this is really not too different from optimizing and coordinating the movement of tanks and other equipment on the battlefield.”
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, research from Booth professor Dan Adelman showed that states could save lives if they shared ventilators with each other.
Our MBA Concentrations in This Area
Operations Management
Learn to maximize value by managing resources effectively. This concentration gives you the strategic vision to operationalize any business.
Our PhD Dissertation Areas in This Area
Management Science and Operations Management
In this program, you’ll combine concepts, models, and data to generate research that will help managers make better operations decisions.
Choose Your Path to Success
Tell us about yourself, and we will show you the value of a Booth education.
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.
Apply to Faculty Positions
Learn more about applying to our open faculty positions and joining the world-renowned faculty at Booth.
Learn About Our Research Workshops
Our research workshops provide a forum for faculty, PhD students, and invited guests to present, discuss, and debate new research.
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)
Research Centers in This Area
Research centers across Booth and the University of Chicago are hubs for innovation and world-changing research. The centers provide our faculty with research support, and our faculty members lend their expertise to the centers, enriching the student experience and the broader academic community at Booth.
Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership
The Davis Center is an incubator and proving ground for generating new insights about leadership that impact education, practice, and discovery for future generations of students.
Healthcare Initiative
The Healthcare Initiative serves as a center of gravity for the diverse disciplines that engage in healthcare research at Booth and across the university.
Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation
As Booth’s social impact hub, the center offers hands-on learning opportunities, supports innovative courses, and pursues research—all with the goal of developing people and practices with the potential to solve the world’s biggest problems.