Academic Areas Operations Management Faculty and Research

The operations management faculty at Chicago Booth are generating research insights with global impact.

Recent research from professor Dan Adelman, 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 healthcare 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 healthcare delivery efficiencies. Student teams work on real-world improvement projects with prominent healthcare 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.

Illustration of 4 poeople around a voting box blowing their hair back with hair dryers

How Businesses Should Use Crowdvoting

Booth’s René Caldentey developed a model to help businesses pinpoint the optimal time to end a crowdvoting campaign.

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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.

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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.

Read the Research

Our MBA Concentrations in This Area

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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

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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.

See All MBA and PhD Courses

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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 Tolan Center for Healthcare 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.

Luigi Zingales and Raghuram Rajan at an event

Apply to Faculty Positions

Learn more about applying to our open faculty positions and joining the world-renowned faculty at Booth.

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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.

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See Our Other Academic Areas

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

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