Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a member of the Operations Management Group at MIT Sloan and affiliated with the MIT Operations Research Center. Levi also serves as the faculty leader for Food Chain Supply Analytics.
Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Levi spent almost 12 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an officer in the Intelligence Wing and was designated as an Extra Merit Officer. After leaving the Military, Levi joined an emerging new Israeli hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant.
Levi's current research is focused on the design of analytical data-driven decision support models and tools addressing complex business and system design decisions under uncertainty in areas such as health and healthcare management, supply chain, procurement and inventory management, revenue management, pricing optimization and logistics. He is interested in the theory underlying these models and algorithms, as well as their computational and organizational applicability in practical settings. Levi has been leading several industry-based collaborative research efforts with some of the major academic hospitals in the Boston area, such as Mass General Hospital (MGH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Children’s Hospital, and across the U.S. (e.g., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC Presbyterian Hospital System and the American Association of Medical Colleges). Levi was the PI on an MIT contract with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to develop systematic risk management approach to address risk related to economically motivated adulterations of food manufactured in global supply chains. With a multi-million award from the Walmart Foundation, Levi currently leads a multi-year U.S.-China collaborative effort to develop new predictive risk analytics tools and testing technologies and platforms to address core food safety challenges in China. Levi has also been involved in developing operational risk and process safety management methodologies for various organizations in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries. Levi received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, the 2008 INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers, the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize and the 2016 Harold W. Kuhn Award.
Levi teaches regularly courses on operations management, analytics, risk management, system thinking and healthcare to students from various degree and non-degree programs including MBA, Executive MBA, PhD, Master and Undergraduate students as well as Executive Education programs. His Healthcare Lab course attracts students from across the MIT campus and engages major industry partners and leaders. Levi has graduated 10 PhD students, 34 Master students and 6 postdoctoral fellows. He was also awarded several prestigious teaching awards.
