New officers ready to lead Analytics Section of INFORMS
Zahir Balaporia heads a new slate of officers that will lead the fast-growing Analytics Section of INFORMS into the second phase of its mission of “promoting the use of data-driven analytics and fact-based decision-making in practice.”
Balaporia takes over the role of president from Michael Gorman, who was instrumental in founding the Section last year. Don Kleinmuntz (vice president), Veena Mendiratta (secretary) and John Quillinan (treasurer) join Balaporia on the Analytics Section’s list of officers. Following are brief bios of each officer:
Zahir Balaporia is director of Intermodal Operations at Schneider National, Inc., where he is responsible for the implementation of technology and related processes within the Intermodal division. Balaporia is primarily responsible for the implementation of dispatch optimization technology and related processes through the application of advanced analytics. Prior to moving into the Intermodal line of business, he led the Decision Engineering team within IT, which specializes in the application of advanced analytical techniques for operational, tactical and strategic decision support. His experience covers supply chain analysis, business process design and operations analysis. At Schneider Logistics, as director of Supply Chain Engineering, he led the consulting team and worked on engagements that spanned a variety of industries and geographies, developing strategic network models to locate distribution facilities and evaluate competing distribution strategies.
Don Kleinmuntz is co-founder of Strata Decision Technology, a leading provider of financial analytics solutions for major hospitals, academic medical centers and healthcare systems. He has served as president, CFO and CIO for the company and currently oversees product direction as executive vice president and chief analytics officer. He has consulted to hospitals and multi-hospital healthcare systems, as well as to a variety of other organizations. In addition, Kleinmuntz has held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin, and has won awards for excellence in research, teaching and professional service. Kleinmuntz is an INFORMS Fellow, founded the INFORMS journal Decision Analysis and served on the INFORMS Board for a total of seven years, including as president in 2009.
Veena Mendiratta is the practice leader for Next-Generation Solutions, Services and Systems Reliability at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent and is an adjunct professor in the Master of Analytics program at Northwestern University. Her work is focused on data analytics and system and network dependability analysis. She has led projects to develop anomaly prediction algorithms for wireless networks and is working on Customer Experience Analytics using data mining and social network analysis techniques. Her professional activities include: past co-chair of the INFORMS Chicago Chapter; PC member IEEE DSN and ISSRE conferences; MCM and HiMCM judge for COMAP math modeling competitions; member, SIAM Visiting Lecturer Program; appointed Fulbright Specialist for five years (2012-2017).
John Quillinan serves as the North American Global Practice Lead for Revenue Management and Pricing within the Business Analytics and Optimization practice of IBM’s Global Business Services. His experience includes a diverse portfolio of industries such as airlines, hospitality, media & entertainment and retail where he implemented revenue management and price optimization models. He is past chair of the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section and the Aviation Applications Section. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management.
