Sridhar R. Tayur is an American business professor, entrepreneur, and management thinker. He is university professor of operations management and Ford Distinguished Research Chair at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and the founder of SmartOps Corporation and OrganJet Corporation. Tayur is known as an "academic capitalist," recognized for his contribution to Inventory Theory, Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing, Operations Strategy, Healthcare Management, and Quantum Computing. He describes his own work as "research, industrial implementation, software entrepreneurship, investing in start-ups and turnarounds, and creating a social enterprise" that lies "in the intersection of math, money, and morals." Tayur's work "has earned him a reputation as someone uniquely talented in identifying, and then solving, novel and timely problems confronting society," according to a 2014 Productions and Operations Management article honoring him. Education and career Tayur attended Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, an elite school in the state of Telangana. He earned his B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1986 and Ph.D. in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell in 1990. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1991 as an assistant professor in The Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) (today known as Tepper School of Business), obtained tenure in 1996, and was promoted to full professor in 1998. In 2019, he was appointed to university professor, the highest designation a faculty member can receive at Carnegie Mellon. He holds Ford Distinguished Research Chair in Operations Management. Within Carnegie Mellon, he holds courtesy appointments in the Heinz College and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has held a courtesy appointment as professor of cardiology (2009–2011) at the Gerald McGinnis Center of West Penn Allegheny Health System. Tayur has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Tayur was president (2001–2002) of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM), one of the largest societies of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has served on the editorial boards of Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, IIE Transactions, Optimization and Engineering, and Productions and Operations Management, among others, and he is a department editor at Management Science, for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department. Tayur founded SmartOps (in 2000) and OrganJet (in 2011), and has consulted for various organizations, including Caterpillar, ConAgra Foods, Deere, Flight Options, General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel, Kellogg's, and Microsoft. Tayur has also served