Bio Sketch

J. George Shanthikumar joined the Krannert School as the Richard E. Dauch Chair in Manufacturing and Operations Management in 2009. In 2014, he is recognized as the University Distinguished professor of Management. Before joining Purdue, he was a Chancellor’s Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. He received the B. Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya, and the M. A. Sc. and Ph. D. degrees in industrial engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

His research interests are in integrated inter-disciplinary decision making, model uncertainty & learning, production systems modeling and analysis, queueing theory, reliability, scheduling, semiconductor yield management, simulation, stochastic processes, and sustainable supply chain management. He has written or written jointly over 300 papers on these topics. He is a coauthor (with John A. Buzacott) of the book Stochastic Models of Manufacturing Systems and a coauthor (with Moshe Shaked) of the book Stochastic Orders and Their Applications and the book Stochastic Orders.

He isis a department editor for Management Science, a department editor for Production and Operations Management, an associate editor of Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, an associate editor of Naval Research Logistics, and a member of the editorial advisory boards of Asia-Pacific Journal of Operations Research and IEEE Transactions on Automation Sciences and Engineering. He was a member of the editorial advisory board of Journal of the Production and Operations Management Society, was a co-editor of Flexible Services & Manufacturing Journal, area editor for Operations Research Letters and was an associate editor for IIE Transactions, International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, Operations Research, OPSEARCH, and Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications. He is also a fellow of INFORMS and POMS.

Dr. Shanthikumar has extensively consulted for various companies like Applied Materials (AMAT), Bellcore, IBM, KLA-Tencor, NTT (Japan), Intel, Intermolecular, ReelSolar, Safeway, and Southern Pacific Railways and through KLA-Tencor worked on Joint Development Projects for AMD, IBM, Intel, LSI, Motorola, TI, Toshiba, Fujitsu, TSMC and UMC. He is an advisory consultant for Sensor Analytics and a member of the technical advisory board of Inter Molecular Inc. and Reel Solar, Inc.

Dr. Shanthikumar has helped KLA-Tencor to successfully transform itself from an engineering inspection tool company to in-process inline inspection and process control company. He developed sample planning methods and fab-level capacity modeling to allow accurate quantification of return on investment of inspection tools. His research convinced, Intel, a major client of KLA-Tencor, to change its strategic thinking regarding the use of inline inspections. This led to a paradigm shift of monitoring reduction to smart monitoring to achieve lower cost. His work resulted in several major patents for yield prediction and tool matching/qualification. The SK-index, named after Dr. Shanthikumar, is used by fab engineers in matching and qualifying the tools for the customers.

Dr. Shanthikumar developed a data-driven production planning tool for Intel. Through this data-driven model, he discovered several shop-floor level coordination between manufacturing and maintenance, which helped to significantly improve the working process performance. This study also led to a new theory in stochastic models that inspires a new stream of academic research.