Bio

Burak Kazaz is the Steven Becker Professor of Supply Chain Management and the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. He is the Director of the Robert H. Brethen Institute at Syracuse University.

Professor Kazaz is the President of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society. Previously, he held various positions in the MSOM Board: Executive Vice President and President Elect, VP of Meetings and Communications and Chair of the iFORM (integration of finance, operations and risk management) special interest group. At Whitman, he served as the Whitman Research Fellow from 2016 to 2018 and as the Executive Director of the H.H. Franklin Center for Supply Chain Management between 2013 and 2017.

Dr. Kazaz’s research interests include risk mitigation, supply chain finance, and socially-responsible supply chains. His publications helped many agricultural and retail firms in their global operations. He established the field of “wine analytics,” and his work on the pricing of wine futures has been highly influential in the wine industry benefiting winemakers and distributors. His publications can be found in premier journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management. His impact is evidenced in that he is frequently featured in popular media including Wine Spectator, Forbes, Bloomberg, Financial Times and the fine wine stock market Liv-ex. He enjoys collaborating with industry; his work is recognized by IBM, British Petroleum, and Procter & Gamble, and is supported through grants from Staples, IBM, and APICS.

Dr. Kazaz’s papers have been the recipient of numerous awards: The 2017 Wickham Skinner Prize from the Production and Operations Management Society (the most prestigious award in the field of production and operations management), the 2016 Best Paper Award from the College of Humanitarian Operations and Crises Management of the Production and Operations Management Society, the 2015 INFORMS President’s Pick as the best paper among all INFORMS journal publications, and the 2014 Best Analytical Paper Award from the Decision Sciences Institute. His wine analytics paper was a runner-up in the 2018 iFORM Best Paper Award. Two of his publications were selected for the 2017 INFORMS Editors’ Cut representing the most influential fourteen papers published in the last five years in all INFORMS journals.

Dr. Kazaz presently serves as an Associate Editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, as a Senior Editor for Production and Operations Management, and as an Area Editor for IIE Transactions.

Dr. Kazaz’s teaching has been recognized with numerous awards. In 2012, he is named as the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence, the highest honor given at Syracuse University. He served as the Whitman Teaching Fellow from 2010 to 2012 and is the recipient of the first-ever Whitman School of Management Teaching Innovation Award in 2011.

Dr. Kazaz received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey and his Ph.D. from the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University. Prior to this appointment, he was a faculty member at the University of Miami and at Loyola University of Chicago, taught at the MBA program of Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, in the Executive Education programs of the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University and the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Kazaz recently developed a unique course on the topic of designing supply chains for growth; the course uses design thinking principles and is popular among start-ups and small firms. His recent studies combine his risk mitigation and pricing analytics with the Blockchain technology.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Kazaz worked at IBM. Additional information about Dr. Kazaz can be obtained at his Whitman web page.