David Dilts
Professor of Engineering Management

David holds the only joint professorship between the Owen Graduate School of Management (OGSM) and the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering (VUSE). He is also the Director for the Engineering Management Program at VUSE and is co-director, with oncologist Alan Sandler M.D., of the Center for Management Research in Healthcare. This center, partially funded by the National Cancer Institute, Vanderbilt University, Emdeon, and other sponsors, has as its primary mission the exchange of knowledge between the management and medical domains in order to dramatically impact the practice of healthcare.

His research, teaching, and presentations have received several awards, including: 2005 Special Recognition Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the 2004 Best Paper Award, “Managing Emergent Supply Networks,” at VIII Annual International Conference on Operations Management, MITIE, Mumbia , India (with SD Pathak), the Decision Science Institute 1997 Best Application Paper Award (honorable mention), the 1994 Distinguished Service Award Production / Operations Management (P/OM)  Division of the Academy of Management, the 1992 Instructional Innovation Award from the Decision Sciences Institute, and in the 1985 AT&T Foundation Award from the AACSB.. He was 1994 Division Chair of the P/OM Division of the Academy of Management and was on the Board of Directors of the Operations Management Association.

Prior to coming to Owen in 1999, for 14 years he was a Professor of Management Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, and a Professor of Optometry, Faulty of Science at the University of Waterloo (UW) in Ontario, Canada. Previous to that he served as an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Michigan State University.

He was editor of the Operations Management Review and currently is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Operations Management and the Decision Science Institute Educational Journal. Also, over the years, he has acquired a number of certifications, including Certified Management Accountant and Certified Production & Inventory Control Manager. Currently, he is an Associate member of the Experimental Therapeutics Program of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

David has published over 140 refereed and invited journal articles, conference papers and presentations, book chapters, edited books and monographs. His business-oriented research has been published in Journal of Operations Management, Decision Science, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Management Accounting, Journal of Technology Transfer, and others. His medical-oriented research and comments have been published in Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMA, Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics, Journal of the American Optometric Association, Computers in Biology & Medicine, Medical Decision Making, Tissue & Cell, and Optometry & Vision Science. In addition to articles, David has presented invited papers around the world to firms and universities in Beijing, Bern, Cranfield, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Nanjing, Nairobi, Tokyo, and Xian. Over the past 10 years, he has been PI or co-PI on over $14.5 million of funded research supported by agencies such as NCI, DoE, DoD, and private sources.

He was the Director of the UW Management of Integrated Manufacturing Systems Research Group and, for the three years prior, he was the Director of the UW Centre for Integrated Manufacturing (WatCIM). As Director of WatCIM, he was responsible for managing an umbrella organization that encompassed five engineering departments, thirty-five research professors, and a 5,000 square foot computer integrated manufacturing laboratory. During his years in industry, he held positions of increasing responsibility, concluding as a Manager of Strategic Planning.

He has a B.S. degree in Business Administration with a Computer Science concentration from California Polytechnic State University (1972); an M.B.A. degree from the University of Oregon (1973). He received his Ph.D. degree in 1983, also from Oregon, with majors in Management Science and Production / Operation Management (P/OM) and with minors in Computer Science, Quantitative Methods and Behavioral Science.