Amy Ward

Biography

Amy Ward's research focuses on the approximation and control of stochastic systems, with applications to the service industry. Much of her past work has focused on the impact of customer impatience and abandonments on performance. Her more recent work investigates the interactions between behavioral incentives and operational efficiency in service systems. Please view her personal web site for a list of her published papers. Please view here for a Chicago Booth Review Q&A.

Ward is a fellow of the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society (elected 6/2023), and is the Editor-in-Chief for the journal Operations Research (term began 1/1/2024).  In the past, she was Editor-in-Chief fot the journal Operations Research Letters (term 4/1/2021-12/31/2023), and earlier held the position of Chair of the Applied Probability Society (term 11/2016-11/2018).

Prior to joining Booth, Ward was Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. She has also been a Visiting Associate Professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at Cal Tech, and an Assistant Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Outside of academia, during her doctoral studies, she spent several summers at AT&T Laboratories.

Ward earned both a PhD and MA from Stanford University, and she holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College.

Academic Areas

• Operations Management