Muckstadt Named Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Fellow

The Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society has elected Professor John A. (Jack) Muckstadt as a Distinguished Fellow of the organization. "Election as an MSOM Fellow should be considered a rare distinction," according to the organization's web site, and Muckstadt joins only 19 others with the title. Previously named Fellows include ORIE Ph.D. graduates Linus Schrage, William Maxwell (an emeritus ORIE professor), and Kenneth Baker.

Muckstadt has been involved with operations management throughout his career, beginning with his Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan. He was an Associate Professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology and an OR analyst for the Air Force Logistics Command before coming to ORIE in 1974. He has served as a consultant on inventory and supply chain management, production control, and manufacturing and logistics system design for many companies and government agencies, including Accenture, General Electic, General Motors, General Foods, IBM, the RAND Corporation, SAS Airlines, and the US Navy. His work with Aeroquip-Vickers, carried out with University of Michigan computer scientist Dennis Severance, was recognized by Fortune Magazine in a 2000 article on "America's Elite Factories." Muckstadt has been the recipient of more than two dozen government and industry research grants, has published numerous papers, and has prepared a legion of loyal graduate students for industrial, academic and government careers. 

While still engaged in supply chain teaching and research, Muckstadt has shifted his focus in recent years to the service sector, specifically to public health logistics. In collaboration with the Weill Cornell Medical College he established the Manhattan-based Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness to integrate logistics models into large scale preparedness and health delivery systems, and has quickly become recognized by agencies such as the National Insitutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control (where he is on the Board of Scientific Counselors) as a leading expert in the area.

MSOM is one of 10 Societies within the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). It focusses on the operations function within manufacturing and services firms, bringing operations research, statistics, economics, information systems and other disciplines to bear on systems design, capacity allocation and pricing, supply chain management and other problems in both the manufacturing and the services sector of the economy. MSOM publishes a quarterly research journal and holds an annual conference, which in 2002 was held at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.   

After a session at the recent Washington, D.C. meeting of INFORMS featuring the Muckstadt and two other new MSOM Fellows, Muckstadt addressed the younger members in the audience. He said "it wasn't that many years ago when I was sitting where you are, watching people get accolades such as we have received here. With hard work and good colleagues, and by taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, you will be up here receiving accolades yourselves."