Ramayya Krishnan is the W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Heinz College and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

A faculty member at CMU since 1988, Krishnan was appointed Dean when Heinz College was created in 2008. He was reappointed upon the completion of his first term as Dean in 2014.

Krishnan was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research, and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems. Krishnan’s research interests focus on consumer and social behavior in digitally instrumented environments.

His work has addressed technical, policy and business problems that arise in these contexts and he has published extensively on these topics. He has served as Department Editor for Information Systems at Management Science, the premier journal of the Operations Research and Management Science Community. Krishnan is current President of INFORMS, a former member of the Global Agenda Council on Data Driven Development of the World Economic Forum, and a former President of the INFORMS Information Systems Society and the INFORMS Computing Society. He is the recipient of the prestigious Y. Nayuduamma award in 2015 for his contributions to telecommunications management and business technology, the Distinguished Alumnus award from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras), and the Bright Internet Award (Jae Kyu Lee Award) from the Korea Society of Management Information Systems.

Krishnan’s government service includes his current work on the IT and Services Advisory Board chaired by Gov. Tom Wolf of the State of Pennsylvania. He has served as an Information Technology and Data Science expert member of multiple U.S. State Department Delegations and briefed ICT ministers of ASEAN in October 2014 on big data technology and policy.

Krishnan’s work on helping to create innovative organizations include his service for six years beginning in 2002 as advisor to the Dean of a new School of Information Systems created by the Government of Singapore within Singapore Management University. Drawing on a partnership with Carnegie Mellon, the work helped the school recruit faculty, develop innovative curricula, and meta curricula and establish best practices for governance of the School.

Krishnan’s leadership experience includes the founding of the information systems and management program at Carnegie Mellon, and in his term as the first Dean of the Heinz College, a unique college that is home to both the Public Policy school and Information Systems school at Carnegie Mellon. This unique co-location of information technology, public policy and management brings together a multi-disciplinary faculty consisting of engineers, social scientists and information technologists dedicated to educating “men and women for intelligent action.” Faculty and students address important issues at the nexus of information technology, policy and management that arise in domains such as information privacy, evidence-based health care delivery, and urban consumer behavior. The College’s global footprint in the U.S. (Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.), in Singapore, and in Adelaide, Australia enable these issues to be addressed from a global point of view using international testbeds and via bi-continental educational programs. INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, the leading organization of scholars and practitioners of analytics, recognized Heinz College in 2016 with the UPS George D. Smith Prize for educational excellence. It is the only education institution that is home to both the Von Neumann Theory Prize and the UPS George D. Smith Prize from INFORMS.

Krishnan led the establishment of funded research centers focused on data-driven decision making in key societal domains including transportation (http://traffic21.heinz.cmu.edu/), smart cities(https://metro21.cmu.edu/), living analytics (http://larc.heinz.cmu.edu), risk and regulatory analytics (https://www.cmu.edu/risk-reg-center/), and AI-led disruption (https://www.cmu.edu/block-center/). He has participated as a panelist in the World Economic Forum and the Consumer Electronics Show.

He has also led a successful fundraising campaign that continues to transform the learning spaces, classrooms, faculty and staff offices, and lab spaces in Hamburg Hall, the home of the Heinz College on the CMU campus.

Paolo Toth is Professor of Emeritus at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Bologna. He has published extensively in the field of Operations Research and Mathematical Programming methodologies especially areas such as, the design and implementation of effective exact and heuristic algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Theory problems, and their application to real-world Transportation, Logistics, Loading, Routing, Crew Management, Railway Optimization problems.

He has served as the President of EURO (Association of the European Operational Research Societies) for the period 1995-1996, and was also the President of IFORS (International Federation of the Operational Research Societies) during the period 2001-2003.

Prof Toth received the “EURO Gold Medal” (the highest distinction within Operations Research in Europe) in 1998; the “Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science” (from INFORMS) in 2005; the “INFORMS Fellowship” in 2016. In May 2003, the University of Montreal conferred him a “Doctorate honoris causa” in Operational Research.

Sridhar Seshadri obtained his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. He is currently the Alan J and Joyce D Baltz Professor in the Geis College of Business. He is the Area Chair for the Information, Operations Management, Supply Chain and Analytics area in the Business Administration Department. Previously, he had served as the Deputy Dean (Operations) and Area Leader Operations Management at the Indian School of Business. He has been a faculty member at The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, the Stern School of Business at New York University and the Administrative Staff College of India. His current research projects focus on development of Micro, Small and Medium manufacturing enterprises in India, pricing and crop choice for agricultural supply chains in India, and sourcing and risk management in global supply networks. In addition, he serves on the board of directors for Nomi Networks and is on the advisory board of Wiley Innovation Advisory Council on Analytics. His professional service includes serving as the Associate Editor, Naval Research Logistics; Associate Editor, Management Science, Area Editor, Operations Research Letters; and Department Editor (Operations and Finance Interface), Production and Operations Management Journal. He has co-authored the book Toyota's Supply Chain Management: A Strategic Approach to Toyota's Renowned System and edited the volume Managing Supply Chains on the Silk Road. His current book project is Essentials of Business Analytics: An Introduction to its Methodology and Applications, to be published by Springer in April 2019.

John Hopes is currently President of the Operational Research Society, having previously served on the Society’s Board as Vice President and President Elect.

John has nearly 40 years’ experience in Operational Research (OR), modelling and analytics, both in industry and as a consultant working across many different sectors. He started his career with eight years at Shell where he had roles in OR, business strategy and production economics. He then moved to professional services with KPMG where he eventually became lead partner for Business Modelling, responsible for selling and delivering solutions to many of the firm’s major clients, both in the UK and across the world.

John then spent 17 years as a partner at EY (formerly known as Ernst & Young) where he was the global leader of Business Modelling and Transaction Analytics. This was a rapidly growing part of the firm’s business that had a headcount of over 800 professionals across over 40 countries by the time John retired from the firm last year.

John is a keen runner and skier. His other interests include literature, history, art and music.

Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari is working in the domain of Manufacturing System and Supply Chain Management. His research and teaching interests are in modeling the Manufacturing Processes and Operations analysis in Supply Chain Networks. Optimization, Simulation and Computational Intelligence are the main techniques adopted by Prof. Tiwari to automate the decision support system for complex and large scale problems in Manufacturing and Logistics System. His research interests have been supported by several industries, national and international research funding agencies. He has published more than 295 papers (Scopus H-index-43) in the International Journals of repute and he has been rated as Rank 1 among top 100 individual researchers across the world who had published research articles in International Journal of Production Research (Taylor and Francis) during the time period 1985-2010 (International Journal of Production Research, Volume 51, Issue 23-24, 2013). Recipient of “Most Influential Researcher Award” in the domain of Operations and Supply Chain Management (Award is given during the Third Green Supply Chain International Conference, 2016 organized by School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, London Campus. Prof. Sir Mike Gregory, Founder and Former Head of IFM, Cambridge University has presented the award). He is the Recipient of Mahalanobis Distinguished Educator Award from the Operations Research Society of India (ORSI), in the category of Management education (2017). Prof. Tiwari also received Dr. R.P. Mohanty Gold Medal Award (2016) for Outstanding Teacher in Industrial Engineering by Indian Institution of Industrial Engineering on 59th National Convention of IIIE at Aurangabad, 2017. Prof. Tiwari is Fellow of Institute of Industrial Engineers (IISE USA), and Fellow of Indian National academy of Engineering (INAE). He is listed among Top 20 most productive authors in the area of Production and Operations Management as reported in the last 50 years (Published in a survey article in Int. Journal of Production Economics, 2009, 120, 540-551) and rated 2nd among many researchers working in Logistics and Supply Chain Management in India (Analysis of the logistics Research in India-White paper published in TU Dortmund University, Dortmund Germany-2012). He is serving as Associate editors of IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics- System,(SMC-S), International Journal of Production Research(Taylor and Francis), Computers and Industrial Engineering (Elsevier), International Journal of System Science (Taylor and Francis), Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing (Springer), Sadhana (Springer) and Neuro-computing (Elsevier) and Decision Support Systems (Elsevier). Prof. Tiwari is in the editorial board of several International Journals such as EJOR (2010-14), IJCIM, PPC, RCIM, IJAMT, JTS etc.

Nita Shah is currently Vice-President of the Operational Research Society of India.

Nita Shah obtained her PhD at the Gujarat University, India after graduating from the same university. She was post-doctoral visiting research fellow of University of Brunswick, Canada. She is currently the professor and head of Department of Mathematics, Gujarat University.

Nita has nearly 29 years’ experience in Operational Research (OR), modelling and analytics. Prof. Nita's research interests include inventory modeling in supply chain, robotic modeling, Mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, image processing, Dynamical systems and its applications etc.

Her professional service includes serving as the Editorial member of Revista Operacional Investigacion, International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management etc. She has authored 3 – books in Mathematics and co-authored the book of Operations Research. She has 3 – edited books for IGI-global and Springer. Nita has published 475+ peer-reviewed research papers. Her papers are published in high impact Elsevier, Inderscience and Taylor and Francis journals.

She has received Hari Om Ashram award in 2009 for the best interdisciplinary research, Best research service award from AIMS in 2011. She is recipient of AIAP Excellence Award (2018) and AIMS International Outstanding Ph.D. Guide Award (2019). She has guided 25 Ph. D. Students and 15 M.Phil. students till now. Seven students are pursuing research for their Ph. D. degree. She has travelled in USA, Singapore, Canada, South Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia for giving talks.

Vinod is a Strategic Consultant with 20+ years of varied experience in the Supply Chain Management domain. He is focused on leading and mentoring JDA's Manufacturing Strategic Services practice and Supply Chain Data Analytics Services.

Vinod graduated from IIT Bombay (Electrical Engineering) in 1996 and completed his PGDM from IIM Ahmedabad in 1998. He joined i2 Technologies (now JDA), a pioneer in the field of Supply Chain Management as a Consultant and progressed through Product Management, Solution Architecting and Project Management, Solution Strategist to his current role of Sr. Director Strategic Services. He has extensive project experience across JDA’s Supply Chain Management solutions suite that heavily relies on use of OR concepts and AI/ ML algorithms to drive SCM transformation stories.

Vinod has been involved with many successful SCM projects in different manufacturing industry sectors including electronics, semiconductors, chemicals, metals and CPG.

Vinod believes a well-rounded exposure is the key that differentiates a good leader. Vinod also leads the Corporate Social Responsibility program at JDA India and his teaching interests lie in demystifying complex subjects like mathematics, astrology and unravelling the mysteries of the mind. He is also a trained teacher of the Art of Living that helps people integrate spirituality in their daily lives.