Jitamitra Desai

Prof. Jitamitra Desai ('JD') is currently a Professor in the Decision Sciences Area at the Indian Institute of Management @ Bangalore (IIM-B). Dr. Desai's research interests are primarily in the areas of optimization and analytics, with wide-ranging applications to engineering and management problems, notably in the transportation sector. Dr. Desai obtained his Ph.D. from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at Virginia Tech, and his B.Tech degree is from the Indian Institute of Technology @ Madras (IIT-M). He has been a speaker at several universities worldwide, including being invited by Harvard Business Publishing Education to talk on the challenges and opportunities of teaching and learning online. Prof. Desai also serves as the faculty representative on the Board of Governors of IIM-B.

Prior to joining IIM-B, he has held faculty positions at Lehigh University (USA) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Dr. Desai has authored several refereed journal articles and book chapters and is actively involved in the analytics community. He has taught several PhD, MBA, and undergraduate-level courses in the decision analytics and data science areas, and was awarded the Nanyang Education Award (2014), a university-wide teaching excellence award. He has also received several research awards, including the "Best Paper Award: Operations Research Track" and "Best Paper Award: Modeling and Simulation Track" at the IISE Annual Conference, USA.

Topic: Predictive and Markov Decision Processes in Aviation Operations