Service Systems Engineering and Management

A. Ravi Ravindran is Professor Emeritus and the former department head of the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He served as a Professor at Penn State from 1997 until his retirement. Formerly, he was a faculty member in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University from 1969-1982 and at the University of Oklahoma from 1982-1997. At Oklahoma, he served as the Director of the School of Industrial Engineering for 8 years and as the Associate Provost of the university for 7 years. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with honors from BITS, Pilani, India. His graduate degrees are from the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. His research interests are in multiple criteria decision-making, financial engineering, healthcare delivery systems, and supply chain optimization. Dr. Ravindran has published 9 books and more than 150 journal articles in operations research. His textbook on Supply Chain Engineering received the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Book-of-the-Year award in 2013. His book on Service Systems Engineering & Management received the IISE's Book-of-the-Year award in 2019. He is a Fellow of IISE and a Fulbright Fellow and currently serves as the co-editor for the Operations Research Series for Taylor & Francis Group/CRC Press.

Paul M. Griffin is the Lucas Professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, and a cofounded faculty for the Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction in the Social Sciences Research Institute at Penn State University, USA. Formally, he was the St. Vincent Health Chair and Director of the Regenstreif Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University, and a professor in the Schools of Industrial Engineering and Biomedical Engineering (2015-2020). He was also the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech (2013-2015), and the Peter and Angela Del Pezzo Chair and Department Head of IME at Penn State (2009-2015). Dr. Griffin began his academic career as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech in 1998. He received a BA in chemistry and a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in industrial engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a PhD in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University. Dr. Griffin's research interests are in healthcare engineering, health analytics, cost and comparative effectiveness in public health, and supply chain coordination. He is a fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering.

Vittal Prabhu is currently a Professor and Charles and Enid Schneider Faculty Chair in Service Enterprise Engineering in the Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State, USA, where he started his academic career as an assistant professor in 1996. He also serves as the Director of the Service Systems Engineering program. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also got his M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Dr. Prabhu received his B.E. in instrumentation technology from Bangalore University. He works in the area of distributed control systems with a focus on manufacturing and service systems consisting of discrete events, physical processes, and service processes. He teaches courses in manufacturing systems, service systems engineering, retail services engineering, and distributed controls and is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.