Prof. Elena Katok

Elena Katok received her B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987, and her MBA (1992) and PhD in Management Science (1996) from Penn State University. Her dissertation on planning manufacturing flexibility under uncertainty won the Decision Sciences Institute's Elwood S. Buffa Doctoral Dissertation Competition.

After faculty positions at SUNY Binghamton and the Colorado School of Mines, she joined the Smeal College of Business at Penn State in 1999, where she became the Calvin E. and Pamela T. Zimmerman Endowed Fellow and Professor of Supply Chain Management. Since 2012 she has been at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, first as Ashbel Smith Professor and since 2018 as Ashok and Monica Mago Professor of Behavioral Operations.

She has been an International Faculty Member at the University of Cologne since 2012. Her early applied work with Jeppesen earned her the 2000 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award. She is a pioneer of behavioral operations management, a field that uses controlled laboratory experiments to test operations models and to understand how human behavior affects them. Her research focuses on procurement mechanism design and auctions, supply chain contracting and coordination, trust and fairness in buyer–supplier relationships, and inventory decision making. She co-edited The Handbook of Behavioral Operations (Wiley, 2019). She serves as Department Editor for Operations Management at Management Science and co-edited its special issue on Human–Computer Connection. She previously served as Department Editor for Behavioral Operations at Production and Operations Management. Prof. Katok has published more than 55 articles in refereed journals, which have received about 9,000 Google Scholar citations (h-index 43).