About me

I am an Assistant Professor of Supply Chain in the Department of Marketing, Management, and Supply Chain at the Woody L. Hunt College of Business, University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). I earned my Ph.D. in Operations Management from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and hold an integrated undergraduate and master’s degrees in Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.

News

• • I plan to present at the INFORMS annual conference 2025 to be held in Atlanta.

Research interests

Urban mobility, empirical operations, and applied modeling. 

Research projects

Urban mobility is continuously evolving, driven by major disruptions such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic as well as slower technological advancements. These disruptions have significantly altered both demand and supply patterns, reshaping how people move within cities. In my projects, my focus has been on understanding and adapting to these changes in the urban mobility landscape.

Change in demand

• Fast-food stores with a drive-through recovered post-pandemic; Stores without did not. (Job market paper)

with Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos. [R&R at M&SOM, Paper on SSRN, Kellogg Insight]

We document a profound, permanent change in the US fast-food consumer demand after the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, after a big pandemic slump, visits to drive-through stores almost recovered to pre-pandemic levels, but visits to non-drive-through stores stayed permanently suppressed.

• Did the pandemic change shopping habits at retail stores?

with Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos. [Published as a technical report on telemobility by the US Department of Transportation in December 2022, Link to report]

We find that most operational outcomes changed substantially at the start of the pandemic, with customers traveling shorter distances, making shorter visits, and shopping more during weekdays and working hours. However, these changes did not persist across most retail categories, and customer behavior reverted to pre-pandemic patterns by 2021. The most persistent changes occurred at fast-food restaurants, where the proportion of short-duration to long-duration visits increased significantly.

Change in supply

• Dual-sourcing of capacity

with Sunil Chopra, Sébastien Martin, and Karen Smilowitz. [In preparation, Paper on SSRN]

(Previous title: Mobility-on-demand meets shuttles on the same mile)

The rise of the on-demand economy has created new opportunities for hybrid systems. Dual-sourcing is a widely used strategy in supply chain management to study how to diversify the use of supply sources in order to manage uncertainty. We extend this framework to transportation and manufacturing contexts. Using a tailored base-surge-like policy with optimality guarantees, we derive important managerial insights on how to manage hybrid systems in these contexts when there is a classic cost and responsiveness trade-off at play.

Teaching

I have tutored MBA students in the core Operations Management course. I was also a grader for undergraduates, MBA and executive MBA students in some elective courses:

• • Operations and Supply Chain Management, taught by Martin Lariviere.

  • Applied advanced analytics, taught by Rob Bray.

  • Strategic Decisions in Operations, taught by Sunil Chopra.

  • Supply Chain Management, taught by Sunil Chopra.

Personal interests

I enjoy going out for a jog or playing outdoor sports like soccer and basketball at leisure. More recently, I have started following the NBA (after the playoffs start) and rated chess tournaments. On my blog page, I sometimes document operational glitches I see around me during long travels when I have time to kill. Looking at day-to-day problems in the real world from the lens of operations management is fascinating to me!