Dr. Jacob Tsao - Visiting Scholar at Campus
October 24, 2009

Dr. Jacob Tsao, professor of industrial and systems engineering at San Jose State University, was invited by SPJIMR's SSME center to contribute to the research in Services Science, Management and Engineering. He conducted a course in Management Science for the one year programme (PGPM) as well as the two year programme(PGDM-2nd year) participants.

Dr. Jacob, a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has written two popular books and has published more than 40 research papers in international journals. He had worked for Consilium Inc., AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Communication Research as a systems engineer for eight years before joining San Jose State University in Silicon Valley. He is a full time professor and programme director at SJSU. He serves on the Vehicle Design Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and has executed projects forNASAand Govt. of California.

He is currently on a sabbatical from August '09 to August '10 and has closely with Dr. Shrikant Parikh of SPJIMR on a proposal for SmartPlanet which is to be submitted to IBM.

SmartPlanet is a small but important initiative by IBM launched in 2008 to build globaly smart infrastructure for energy, water, information and transportation. Dr. Jacob is working towards improving the quality and efficiency of India's Grain Supply Chain Management. He has proposed various research projects in the past. In lieu of his present supply chain research project in association with the SSME Center, he visited APMC and other key players in Mumbai. He has proposed some tentative solutions with another couple of projects lined up in the near future.

This is Dr. Jacob's third visit to India – previous ones being a study tour and a conference in 2008 organised by IIT Bombay where he was an invited speaker. But this time, on being invited by the SSME Center, he chose to visit SPJIMR (though he was also invited by IIT Bombay) and our participants had the opportunity of benefitting from the knowledge of such an eminent researcher and scholar.

The research project work in collaboration with the SSME center will continue after he returns to SiliconValley.