Brian Denton named next Industrial and Operations Engineering Chair

PEOPLE:

U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) professor Brian Denton has been named the new chair of the department, effective September 1, 2018. He will be the twelfth chair of the department, which was founded in 1955. He succeeds Mark Daskin, the Clyde W. Johnson Collegiate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, who has served as chair since January 2010.

“I’m looking forward to the opportunity to shape the direction of the department and develop new areas in addition to the great things we’re already doing,” Denton said.

Denton’s research covers data-driven sequential decision-making and optimization under uncertainty with applications to medicine. His current projects include individualized medical treatment optimization for chronic diseases, optimal design of biomarker-based screening strategies for early detection of cancer and predictive models for precision health. He has a courtesy appointment in the School of Medicine and is a member of the Cancer Center and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI).

“I am confident Brian’s broad academic background and interdisciplinary interests will be an asset to IOE in the pursuit of the next level of leadership,” said Alec D. Gallimore, who is the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and a professor both of aerospace engineering and of applied physics.

Denton is a past president of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He joined U-M’s IOE faculty in 2012. Previously, he was an assistant and associate professor at North Carolina State University (2007-2012), a senior associate consultant at Mayo Clinic (2005-2007), and a senior engineer at IBM (2001-2005).

“The opportunities for collaboration are excellent, especially for a department like IOE because we have so many opportunities to apply what we do in different areas,” Denton said. “Being in an environment where there’s so many incredible faculty across the campus means there’s virtually unlimited opportunity.”