Faculty Biographies

Thomas Knowles

Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Operations Management

Office: Suite 402
E-Mail: knowles@stuart.iit.edu
Phone: 312.906.6530
Fax: 312.906.6549

Education

• B.S., Chemical Engineering, Purdue University
• MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• Ph.D., University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Affiliated Programs

Research Interests

• Management Science/Operations Research
• Mathematical Programming and Its Application
• Spreadsheet Modeling
• Scheduling and Production Planning and Control
• Forecasting
• Generalized Column Generation Methods

Biography
Thomas W. Knowles is a Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Operations Management at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After graduating from Purdue University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, he worked for Lever Brothers Company as a plant engineer and production supervisor. Simultaneously, he began a part-time MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He enjoyed the program enormously, and his academic success and resulting scholarships afforded him the opportunity to join the full-time MBA Program. After completing the MBA, he was invited to join the Ph.D. program and awarded an Earhart Fellowship that continued until he joined Illinois Institute of Technology in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. In 1979, he joined the Stuart School of Business as an Assistant Professor, eventually becoming Associate Professor and Professor.

Dr. Knowles is the author of the textbook Management Science: Building and Using Models, published by Richard D. Irwin, Inc. He has supervised many Ph.D. theses at IIT and served as a resource and committee member for many Ph.D. students from many of IIT's engineering and science departments. He has published numerous basic and applied research papers and presented his research at conferences in the USA and at international forums. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

He has consulted for many companies and government agencies, usually developing optimization-based decision models, in a wide range of business areas including operations, finance, and marketing. Examples include multi-level manufacturing planning for a large, multinational company; sizing and optimizing the operation of storage, pipeline, and purchase contracts for a natural gas company; developing a system to buy and sell bonds from a portfolio so that its characteristics track a selected index; scheduling ground personnel for an airline; allocating advertising funds to different media (considering cannibalization or halo effects on similar products from the same company); and many others.