Sean Willems

Sean Willems is the Haslam Chair in Supply Chain Analytics at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business. In 2000, he co-founded Optiant, a provider of multi-echelon inventory optimization tools, which was later acquired by Logility, Inc. He has been a visiting professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management since 2016. His work with companies such as Hewlett Packard, Proctor & Gamble, and Intel has led to finalist selections for the 2003, 2010, and 2017 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He has been a finalist in 2006, 2008 and 2012 for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. His work on inventory placement under non-stationary demand won the Wagner Prize in 2008. Willems is the department editor of the practice section of the journal Production and Operations Management and he is the deputy editor of Interfaces. He received his bachelor’s degree in decision sciences from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and his master’s in operations research and doctorate in operations management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.