People

Dr. Sala is the Vice COO and Vice CMO in May 2012 at the Instituto Modelo de Cardiologia a boutique institution in Cordoba Argentina with a strong focus on cardiovascular patients, where he launched an institutional transformation directed towards lean implementation and international accreditations. He was responsible for the Argentinean Quality Accreditation, ITAES (recognized by IAQUA, Europe) in 2014; the American College of Cardiology Accreditation in Chest Pain (2017), the American College of Cardiology Accreditation in Heart Failure (2018) and the American College of Cardiology recognition as an International Center of Excellence (2019). He leads the institutional Lean transformation since 2012 and he was the program advisor of the Ohio State University Fisher School of Business program, Creating lean leaders to drive change in Argentina, in 2018. He is the founder of the Lean Institute Argentina that is being incubate at the Instituto Modelo de Cardiologia since 2018 with the support of the Lean Global Network. He has been invited to lecture Nationally and Internationally about his approach to transform a healthcare organization, very challenging in a country with annual inflation rates that can be higher than 50%. He has more than 40 publications in peer reviewed journals, wrote book chapters, and has been a reviewer of 11 journals among them the JACC, Circulation Research, etc.

Fogliatto holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Rutgers University, USA (1997). He was visiting scholar at the CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers – Paris, France) in 2005–2006. Currently he is Full Professor at the IE Department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where he served as Graduate Director for three terms and Department Head for two terms. His expertise is in the areas of Quality Engineering, Production Analysis, and Operations Research. His main research interests are healthcare operations management, quality control and optimization of products and processes, mass customization, and quantitative methods in production control. He received the IIE Transactions best paper award in 2002, the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Best Conference Paper award, and best papers awards at the 2010 (Rotterdam, Holand) and 2012 (Rennes, France) editions of the Sensometrics Conference. His research has been published in the International Journal of Production Research, IIE Transactions, Food Quality & Preference, Production Planning and Control and International Journal of Production Economics, among others.  

Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy (Gopal) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS), UK. Prior to joining ULMS, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. He completed his doctoral studies from the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, India. During his doctoral studies, Gopal has been a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He researches in the area of healthcare operational excellence, transformative service research, disruptive technologies, and decision making. His research has been accepted for publication in Journal of Service Research, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Business Ethics, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Computers & Operations Research, Production Planning & Control, and Computers in Industry, among others.  

Maneesh Kumar is a Professor of Service Operations at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University,UK. He also holds an honorary Visiting Professor role at Cardiff & Vale University Health Board. He conducts inter-disciplinary applied research in the area of Operational Excellence, including topics such as Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma (LSS), Lean, Green, and Innovation (iLEGO), Healthcare Process/Service Innovation, Knowledge Clusters for capability enhancement within SMEs. This has resulted in the publication of over 165 journals and conference papers, edited books, and conference proceedings. In 2020, he was recognized with the ‘Business Innovation’Award @ Cardiff University’s Innovation and Impact Awards 2020 for the project with Siemens Logistics. He was also recognized by the Industrial Engineering & Operations Management (IEOM) Society at the 2nd African International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (7th-10th December 2020), where he was also invited as a Keynote Speaker. The IEOM Award Committee has bestowed 'Distinguished Professor Award'. He has been recognized for his outstanding contributions to teaching at Cardiff University’s Celebrating Excellence Awards 2018 in the category of 'Excellence in Teaching including Training & Development'. He has been involved in delivering LSS training up to Black Belt level and delivered several workshops on LSS and Industry 4.0 applications in different type and size of industries. 

I am a MD trained in Internal Medicine and hold a PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the University of Washington in Seattle. I am a Senior Lecturer in Digital Health and Deputy Director of the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health, both at the University of Melbourne. My main research interests focus on developing methods to improve the use of clinical data to generate clinical knowledge. This includes the use of electronic health records and the data collected in them to better understand clinical processes using process mining and the impact that the execution of clinical processes have on patient outcomes and health system’s performance.

I have extensive experience in applied health informatics since I was the Chief Medical Information Officer for Chile's Catholic University healthcare network (2 hospitals, 11 clinics) during 4 years and I founded the Chilean National Centre for Health Information Systems, a 5-university initiative to implement healthcare information interoperability standards and to develop the health informatics workforce in the Chile.

Tarcisio A. Saurin is an Associate Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He has a PhD in Industrial Engineering (2002), a  MS in Construction Management (1997), and a BS in Civil Engineering (1994). He was a visiting professor at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation at Macquarie University (2018), and at the University of Salford, UK (2012). His main research interests are related to the modelling and management of complex socio-technical systems, lean production, resilience engineering, safety management, and performance measurement. He has carried out research and consulting projects on these topics in healthcare, construction, electricity distribution, and manufacturing. He has also supervised 69 graduate students (55 MS and 14 PhD) and authored a number of journal papers, book chapters, and conference papers on these topics. 

Valery Pavlov is a Senior Lecturer in the Information Systems and Operations Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics in the University of Auckland. Dr. Pavlov finds healthcare problems are perhaps the most urgent and rewarding to work on because even a slight improvment may be beneficial for a large number of people. At the same time, they appear to be the hardest. As an example, the problem of Emergency Department crowding has become an area of active research 30 years ago. However, despite all academic research and improvement efforts continuously put by hospitals, the situation with ED crowding appears to be only getting worse across the world.s. 

Sergio Maturana Valderrama is a full-time professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile where he teaches and researches in the areas of Marketing, Logistics and Management Support Systems. The courses he usually teaches are Marketing and Logistics Management at the Engineering School of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also teaches in the Master's Program in Industrial Engineering (MII) at the same university. In 2011, Professor Maturana received the award for Excellence in Teaching from the School of Engineering. He has written numerous articles, both in national and international magazines. He has also given conferences, both in Chile and abroad, on the topics of Marketing, Logistics and Management Support Systems. Professor Maturana has directed two Fondecyt projects and one Fondef project. He has also been alternate director of a Fondef project and participated in another. He has also directed a large number of master's thesis and title reports on Marketing, Logistics and Management Support Systems.

Professor Jorge Vera is a Mathematical Civil Engineer from the University of Chile and obtained his doctorate from Cornell University, United States in the area of ​​Operational Research. He has been a professor at the Catholic University since 1998 and was Visiting Professor at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from August 2007 to June 2008. He served as Head of Department between April 2004 and June 2007. He has developed his research and teaching in the areas of Operational Research and Operations Management, with a special interest in the use of Optimization models to support decisions in companies. His research work has been focused on understanding the factors that affect the sensitivity and robustness of the solutions delivered by Optimization models, especially those used in decision making. He has also carried out applied research and development in the Forest industry and the Wine industry, among others. He has publications in the most important magazines in the area. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Mathematical Programming Society and the Chilean Institute for Operational Research, ICHIO. 

Alejandro Cataldo is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Center for Mathematical and Computational Modelling in the School of Engineering in the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), where he maintains a position in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He holds PhD and MSc degrees in Operations Research from the PUC and MSc degrees in Operations Research from Universidad de Chile. As an academic, he is focused on responding to the new logistics challenges that arise from pricing decision and health care management. To study this type of problems, he has modeled and analyzed dynamic and stochastic request management, in order to achieve an efficient use of resources (which, in the case of public health, are always very scarce).  His work has been published in top scientific journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research and Computers & Operations Research.

Abey Jose received the Ph.D. degree in engineering science from the School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Santiago. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. He possesses a combined experience of about 13 years in both the industry and academic sectors in India, Chile, Australia, and Italy. His research interests include Industry 4.0, digital transformation, digital twins, healthcare operations, and organizational change management.