Rate My Professor Eitan Zemel

Eitan Zemel serves as the Deputy Dean at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategy at NYU Shanghai, holding the W. Edwards Deming Professorship in Quality and Productivity within the Business & Economics faculty. He joined NYU Stern in 1998, following a prominent tenure at Northwestern University's J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he was the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Operations Research, Chair of the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Department, and Founding Director of the Master of Management in Manufacturing Program. His earlier roles at Northwestern progressed from Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences in 1976 to Professor, IBM Research Professor, and joint appointment in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. At NYU Stern, Zemel has led extensively, including as Founding Chair of the Operations Management Department (1998-1999) and the Information, Operations, and Management Sciences Department (2001-2005), Vice Dean for MBA Programs, Langone Part-Time MBA, Executive MBA Program, TRIUM Global Executive Program, and Global Masters Program in Business Analytics, as well as Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives, Global Programs, and Executive Education. He also served as Founding Dean of Business and Engineering at NYU Shanghai.

Zemel earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976, M.Sc. in Applied Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1972, and B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics with distinction from The Hebrew University in 1970. His research specializes in operations strategy, supply chain management, service operations, and incentive issues in operations management, evolving from foundational work in computations, algorithms, and complexity. Notably, he contributed key concepts to the first practical algorithm for large knapsack problems, concepts still employed in modern solvers. Zemel co-authored the textbook Managing Business Process Flows (initially 1999, with subsequent revisions). His scholarly articles have appeared in premier outlets such as Econometrica, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Games and Economic Behavior, and Annals of Operations Research. He has served on editorial boards for Manufacturing Review, Production and Operations Management, Management Science, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. In 2024, he received the Leadership Excellence Award from the Department of Marketing at NYU Stern.