Sridhar Tayur is the Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Operations Management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras. He has held visiting positions at MIT and Cornell.
He is the founder of the software company SmartOps Corporation (2000-‐) [acquired by SAP AG in 2013] and served as its CEO for 12 years, as well as the founder of a hybrid social enterprise, OrganJet Corporation (2011-‐) and GuardianWings (2012-‐). SmartOps is the subject of a Darden Case Study (2011), now distributed by Harvard, while the “contract hybrid”-‐-‐ OrganJet and GuardianWings – the first of its kind, is a subject of a Harvard Business School Case Study (2013).
He has published extensively in Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Stochastic Models, QueuingSystems, Transportation Science, IIE Transactions, NRLQ, Journal of Algorithms and MSOM Journal), is co-‐editor of the widely referenced book, Quantitative Models for Supply ChainManagement, and has served on the editorial boards of Operations Research, Journal of Optimization and Engineering, NRLQ, MSOM Journal and Management Science. Dr. Tayur also served as President of Manufacturing and Services Operations Management (MSOM) Society. He has been a finalist for the Lanchester Prize as well as the Edelman Prize. His work on incentives in healthcare won the 2012 Best paper Award by POMS; his work on OrganJet was awarded the Pierskalla Award in 2015. He has won the Undergraduate teaching Award, the George Leland Bach teaching award given by MBA students, the INFORMS Teaching Case award, and has been named as a ‘Top Professor’ by Business Week. His PhD students have won many awards (including the Nicholson prize, Dantzig Prize and NSF CAREER awards) and are placed at top academic departments as well as on Wall Street. He has been recognized for his entrepreneurship through an Ernst&Young finalist award as well as by the Carnegie Science Center award for Innovation in Information Technology. He was named INFORMS Fellow in 2012.
Over the past 25 years, he has also been a sought-‐after supply chain consultant and has helped implement manufacturing and supply chain optimization systems for Caterpillar, Deere and General Electric, as well as implement solutions in other areas such as Fractional Jet scheduling (for Flight Options) and Advertisements in Internet games (for Microsoft). He has consulted (and done executive education) for McKinsey & Company, Cisco and Schibsted. His industrial work has been reported in business periodicals, including an article in FORTUNE concerning his work at Caterpillar, titled “New Victories in the Supply Chain Revolution”.
He served on the board of CCG Inc., a private equity group, and was on the advisory board for the (not-for-profit) Polaris Project (combating Human Trafficking). He is on the advisory board of TrueSpark (a not-for-profit that uses films to build character among youth) and the Board of Directors of Orchestro.
He is the founder of RAGS Charitable Foundation that supports independent films through SilkScreen Festival, documentary films, child health and education through Plan International and Children International, and early stage medical/science research with projects on Warfarin dosage (Pharmacogenetics) and combating rare neurological diseases using RNAi. In 2014, he and his wife made a $1 Million donation to CMU and in 2016 announced the endowment of an Institute Chair at IIT-Madras.
His work on Organ Transplantation has been covered by several media outlets, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Forbes, The Guardian, CBS News (Boston), CBS News (Denver) as well as in an article profiling him in The Atlantic, and has attracted the attention of several luminaries including Nobel winner Alvin Roth who has highlighted OrganJet several times on his Market Designer blog.
He has been a keynote speaker at INFORMS, MSOM and POMS, has been a commencement speaker at South Park High School and CMU-‐Heinz school, and has given the Marschak Lecture (UCLA) and Bangs Lecture (Cornell).