International Seminar by Prof. Suresh P. Sethi at the ESIEM Foundation
July 10, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. — On line webinar
The Foundation European School of Industrial Engineering and Management ETS hosted an international seminar by Prof. Suresh P. Sethi, Eugene McDermott Chair of Operations Management and Director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas.
The seminar, titled “Building and Evolving an Operations Management Department: Research, Doctoral Training, and Emerging Challenges (1996–2025)”, traced the strategy behind one of the most remarkable trajectories in the field: under Prof. Sethi’s leadership, the Operations Management department at UT Dallas’s Jindal School of Management rose from rank No. 77 (1993–1997) to rank No. 1 (2019–2023) in the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings.
The seminar will be introduced by Dr. Tommaso Portaluri, Verity AG
Drawing on three decades of experience, Prof. Sethi discussed the factors behind this growth — from launching a doctoral program and recruiting world-class faculty to designing a competitive PhD curriculum shared across disciplines, before turning to the challenges the department is facing today, including the integration of artificial intelligence into doctoral training and research practice.
Suresh P. Sethi is Eugene McDermott Chair Professor of Operations Management and Director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks (C4ISN) at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has written 11 books and published over 400 research papers in manufacturing and operations management, finance and economics, marketing, and optimization theory. He initiated and developed doctoral programs in operations management at The University of Texas at Dallas UTD and the University of Toronto. He built the operations management area of UTD’s Naveen Jindal School of Management into its current research powerhouse. Two conferences were organized in his honor: in Aix-en-Provence in 2005 and at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2006, with Harry M. Markowitz, a 1990 Nobel Laureate in Economics, as the keynote speaker. In 2025, there are/will be three conferences in his honor at The Magna Carta Island in London, The University of Texas at Dallas, and National Economics University in Hanoi. Two books have been edited in his honor. Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) awards the Suresh Sethi Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award every two years, beginning in 2025. Prestigious honors and awards received by him include Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Science, IEEE Fellow, INFORMS Fellow, SIAM Fellow, POMS Fellow, AAAS Fellow, IITB Distinguished Alum, Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business-Alumni Achievement Award (2015), and POMS President (2012).
The seminar offered a valuable basis for dialogue on the evolving intersection of operations management and industrial engineering in higher education, a theme directly aligned with the Foundation’s mission to innovate higher education in IE&M across Europe.
