I was actually born in the United States in Texas but have no memory of that. I grew up in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. I have lived in Indiana where I got my PhD degree at Purdue University. I also have lived in Moscow, Idaho. That was where my first teaching assignment was, my first faculty position at the University of Idaho. I've taken a couple of sabbaticals where I, for one year, lived in Costa Rica and then also lived almost a year in Valencia, Spain. I also did some humanitarian service in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Let's see, what kind of things do I enjoy doing? I like to golf a lot, that's probably my favorite sport. I like to bike as well. I'm not very good at it, I feel like but I enjoy that as a form of exercise. I like mostly spending time with my family. I really love to travel so beside living in those other places, I've visited a lot of places both in the United States and outside. I really enjoy doing that especially if I take some of my family with me.

Our principal undergraduate program is Major in Operations Management. The classes that students take, there are some required classes so one is a class in Supply Chain Management and other class is in Project Management and a third class is in what we call Management Science. It is a quantitative method applied to business problems especially operations management kinds of problems. We also require that all of our students do a capstone experience, where they serve on a team and work with usually local company to solve some kind of operations related problem. Besides those classes, we have electives in Service Operations Management and Production Planning and Control in Six Sigma in Quality Management. I'm forgetting at least one but those are the main classes. Our program has an emphasis on process improvement, how you analyze the process and try to make it better to maximize the output of some kind, maximize profit, minimize costs. There are various kinds of jobs that students who graduate from our program get. Some of those include, one of our main employers is called IM Flash Technology, which is a joint venture between Intel and Micron. They have a facility where they build different kinds of memory, the Flash memory was what they became most famous for but they've moved on to some more solid state kinds of devices and so on. Graduates of our program work with their automated processes to analyze all the data that come out of those processes, to try to understand what's working well and what's not working well and try to optimize and improve those processes. We have students also working in healthcare. We have students who have gone to work for a local healthcare company, Inter Mountain Healthcare. They again are working on process improvement so how you improve processes within the healthcare organization. We have students who work for Goldman Sachs. We have a very large Goldman Sachs operations center here in Salt Lake City and so our students work there as well. We have students who have gone to work for Boeing, for Amazon, for PepsiCo, Frito Lay, in particular. Those are some examples of some of the jobs that our students get. In terms of graduate programs, I do have a little bit of a part in our Information Systems graduate program but I teach an elective there and data analysis. That was a little more tangential for me. The other one where I'm more heavily involved and help design is our Business Analytics program. We have recently created that. We have classes that are taught jointly between our department which includes a little bit of operations not so much there but our Information Systems faculty and then with marketing. The class that I teach there is one called Analytical Decision Models. It's very much like our Management Science class for undergraduates where part of the classes on deterministic models where we optimized using a linear programming, in particular. Then there are elements of the second part of that class, we have more probabilistic models where I look at queuing, waiting line models and also look to some simulation and also some forecasting techniques mostly just simple smoothing kind of forecasting, a little bit with Box-Jenkins time series models. That's my participation in those classes.

I started my career while doing my doctoral research. I spent most of my time researching questions in quality management and in particular something called statistical process control which continues to be a really important part of Six Sigma Process Improvement and Monitoring. In statistical process control, the principle assumption is that observations that are monitored to see if the process remains consistent. Those observations are assumed to be independent but in many processes especially in chemical kinds of processes, continuous flow processes, observations are not independent. What I did was looked at using some common time series models to model the output from those processes and then apply some forecasting techniques ,again Box-Jenkins models like I teach in the class and apply those models to the process. Then instead of monitoring the actual process measurements, we've monitored the residuals, the forecast errors from those processes. That had been proposed when I was doing my dissertation research. I didn't realize it would have been proposed, by the way, but when I discovered that it has been proposed, I felt a little bit bad because I thought my research program was going out the window because I thought somebody else has already done all the research I was thinking of doing. It turned out that those who had proposed it had not really analyze the properties of using those forecast errors to monitor process quality and so I was able to take a close look at what happens when a process shock, when there's something that shifts the mean of the process, how those control charts that use the forecast errors how they react to that shock and was able to show some interesting properties of that. Actually, that research turned out to be quite beneficial for me because I published a total of four papers for my dissertation and two of the four were especially well received and have been cited well. That was my early research. I continued to do research in the area of Statistical Process Control after my doctoral program where I applied it to some healthcare settings and in particular customer satisfaction, patient satisfaction data. I also have done some work where I looked with several co-authors that the quality of care in nursing homes and whether there's a difference in care between for profit and not for profit nursing homes and what incentives are there but we've looked at it with the lens of quality management practices, how you manage the processes, how you manage the people, what kind of leadership practices are in place and so on. More recently I've been interested in questions regarding service operations and looked in particular at some ways to standardized processes within a service. One common method that gets used is our script where the customer service representatives are either using a written script or they might have something that says how they are supposed to act, what kinds of body language to use and so on. We in particular looked at written scripts and we were curious first of all, could customers recognize when a script is being used and then second of all, do they care and what kinds of processes do they care? I suppose in some sense our results are not earth shattering but what we found was that we use the hotel as our setting and we use the video experiment where respondents watch the video as if they were the customer and first we had them look at checking into a hotel and then we had them using the concierge service to ask for recommendations for a restaurant. In all cases, if the customers could recognize when the script was being used and actually could differentiate between levels of scripting. It was very rigid scripting versus kind of moderately scripted versus essentially spontaneous so the customers could recognize that. We found that they didn't seem to care very much if it was crafted in the check-in service. When a process is more standardized, the customers didn't seem to mind that. In fact, you could check in to a hotel using something very automated and don't even need a human being so it doesn't really matter if it's highly scripted whereas if you're using something where you want more customization like a concierge than having something that seems a little robotic that scripted heavily does influence the perceived quality of that interaction. Those were things we were able to show.