The Production and Operations Management Society recently honored Professor David Simchi-Levi of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Engineering Systems Division with an article on his professional achievements published in the January-February issue of the journal, Production and Operations Management. The journal honors two to three researchers annually. Past honorees include MIT Sloan professors Jay Forrester and Stephen Graves.

The article cites Simchi-Levi’s contributions to both the theoretical and practical aspects of supply-chain management as demonstrated by the quality and reach of his published research; the application of this research in corporate practice; his seven years as editor-in-chief of Operations Research; and the popularity of his second book as a graduate business education text.

That book, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain: Concepts, Strategies and Case Studies (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2007) by Simchi-Levi, Philip Kaminsky and Edith Simchi-Levi, is now in its third edition. In 2000 it was named book of the year by the Institute of Industrial Engineering. Earlier this year, the blog Supply Chain Management (SCM) Operations listed the book on its “10 Greatest Supply Chain Management Books of All Time,” based on the number of citations for books found by Google Scholar.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University, Simchi-Levi was on the faculty of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University (1986-1993), the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University (1993-2000) before joining the MIT faculty. At MIT he is co-director of the Leaders for Global Operations, co-director of the MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation, head of the new Accenture and MIT Alliance in Business Analytics, leader of the MIT-Technion Postdoctoral Program, a member of the Operations Research Center and former co-director of the System Design and Management partnership.

In 2009, he was awarded the Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the world’s largest professional society for the field of operations research, management science and business analytics. INFORMS awarded the prize to Simchi-Levi for a series of three papers that made fundamental contributions to the field.