Sunil Chopra

Sunil Chopra, currently the Senior Associate Dean for curriculum and teaching at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, has been named Interim Dean of the school. Dr. Chopra, who joined Kellogg in 1989, is also the IBM Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at Kellogg. His appointment as Interim Dean will be effective Sept. 1, 2009. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at the Stern School of Business Administration at New York University. He has a PhD in Operations Research from SUNY Stony Brook.

Professor Chopra’s research and teaching interests are in Operations Management, Logistics and Distribution Management, design of communication networks and design of distribution networks. He has co-authored the books Managing Business Process Flows and Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation. Both books are published by Prentice Hall and are used at several of the top business schools to teach Operations Management and Supply Chain Management respectively. The Supply Chain Management book was awarded the best book of the year for 2002 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). Professor Chopra has won several teaching awards at Kellogg.

He has been Departmental Editor for the journals Management Science and an Associate Editor for the Decision Sciences Journal, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management  and Operations Research. His recent research has focused on risk management in supply chains. He has also studied distribution systems in a variety of companies trying to identify market, manufacturing, and product characteristics that drive the structure of a supply chain.

He has consulted for a variety of firms including Boise Cascade Office Products, GE Capital, W.W. Grainger, Motorola, Intel, and Sara Lee.