Tava Olsen is the Deputy Dean and a Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at Melbourne Business School. Prior to joining Melbourne Business School in late 2022, she was the head of two departments at the University of Auckland Business School: Information Systems and Operations Management, as well as Accounting and Finance. She also served previously as Deputy Dean from 2020 to 2021 and was the Director of its Centre for Supply Chain Management from 2010 to 2022. Before moving back to her native Auckland, Tava spent most of her academic career in the United States. She taught operations and manufacturing management at Washington University’s Olin Business School – first as Associate Professor and later Professor – from 2000 to 2010 and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan before that.

Tava is an expert in the stochastic and economic modelling of production, service, agricultural, and health systems, with a PhD from Stanford University in Operations Research. Among other journals, she has extensive experience publishing in and serving on the editorial boards of four Financial Times Top 50 journals, namely Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. She has taught a wide variety of courses, including operations management, service operations, healthcare management, business analytics, simulation, critical thinking, and project management, to a range of audiences from bachelors to executives. Tava also served as President of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society and has been awarded more than $3 million of external funding throughout her career, including through the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Grant and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award in the US.