Dr. Suresh Sethi
- Professor of Operations Management
- Eugene McDermott Distinguished Chair
The estate of Eugene McDermott created the chair in September 1973. Sethi filled the position in September 2011. The chair was created as enduring support to The University of Texas at Dallas.
“I am honored and deeply humbled to be the holder of this chair. The Naveen Jindal School of Management has provided an environment in which to build one of the world’s best programs in operations management. The growth and intellectual development of UT Dallas during my time here has been without parallel, and I am looking forward to an even brighter future.”
Dr. Suresh Sethi’s research areas are supply chain management, stochastic inventory models, dynamic advertising problems and mathematical finance. He developed the first stochastic advertising model, known as the Sethi model, which is used to analyze the dynamic relationship between advertising and sales.
Sethi employed optimal control theory, an area of mathematics developed to find optimal ways to control dynamic systems and treat dynamic and stochastic problems in business. A textbook he co-authored introduced optimal control theory to business schools and spurred much research.
When he arrived at UT Dallas in 1997, he embarked on building a first-class group in operations management and established the Operations Management doctoral program, which is now recognized worldwide. He is the founder and director of the UT Dallas Center for Intelligent Supply Networks, which offers solutions to supply chain challenges at regional companies using faculty research and the work of students.
He has written eight books and published nearly 400 papers. He is a departmental editor for Production and Operations Management and a corresponding editor for the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. He has served on the editorial boards of Operations Research, M&SOM (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management) and Automatica.
Sethi has been named a fellow of such professional groups and organizations as the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Royal Society of Canada, the Production and Operations Management Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2012, he was the president of the Production and Operations Management Society.
Sethi earned his bachelor of technology from the Indian Institute of Technology and his MBA at Washington State University. He earned his master of science in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University, where he also earned his PhD in operations research. Sethi received the Alumni Achievement Award from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in 2015.