Director

Professor Zhe George Zhang teaches business statistics and quantitative method courses in the Department of Decision Sciences, College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, USA. He is also an adjunct professor in Management Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He received a BSc degree in computer science, an M.A. in economics from Nankai University in China, an MBA from Schulich School of Business at York University , and a Ph.D from the University of Waterloo .

Professor Zhang's research interests include queuing theory and applications, stochastic dynamic programming, probability models in reliability, and supply chain management issues in manufacturing and service organizations. The main theme of his research is to bridge the gap between theory and application, obtaining unobservable and sometimes counter-intuitive but significant/practical management insights via modeling and quantitative analysis. Currently, he is particularly interested in the quantitative and economic analysis of the congestion problems in urban/mass transportation networks, health/medical care systems, and public service systems with both customer service quality and security concerns. He has been invited to present his research as plenary speeches or keynote talks in several international conferences and as seminars at major universities in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America.

His studies include both theoretical work and a wide range of applications in business, engineering, economics, and applied mathematics. His publications have appeared in the top journals of his research area such as Management Science , Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management , Interfaces , Production and Operations Management , Queueing Systems , Journal of Applied Probability , IIE Transactions , IEEE Transactions , Naval Research Logistics , European Journal of Operations Research , Journal of Operational Research Society and many other international journals in operations research and applied probability (over 110 papers). His research has been cited widely (Google Scholar). He has been invited to present seminars/workshops or conduct joint research projects (visiting professor) in many universities globally such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, HKUST, National Taiwan University, Kyoto University, Korea University, National University of Singapore, University of British Columbia, McGill University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Stanford University, Cambridge University, and Erasmus University and many others.

Co-authored with N. Tian, his research monograph entitled Vacation Queueing Models - Theory and Applications has been published in 2006 by Springer Science. This is the first book that discusses both single and multiple server queuing systems with vacations. It provides a comprehensive treatment of the extension of the queuing theory. The book contains the updated research results and some practical applications of this class of models. The book has been reviewed by the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the premier journal of statistical science.

Professor Zhang is one of the Editors-in-Chief of Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS). As one of the premier operation research (OR) journals, JORS is the first OR journal in the world. He is also one of the founding Editors-in-chief of Queueing Models and Service Management , was an associate editor of INFOR, and is on the editorial board of several international journals.

Here is the mainstream OR/MS/IE/OM journal development history.　

Here is the academic family tree of George Zhang