Associate Professor
School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering

Mark Lewis specializes in applied probability and stochastic processes. He holds a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering (Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998) and an MS in theoretical statistics (Florida State University, 1995). 

Among his formative influences he counts his two undergraduate mathematics professors (Walter Walker and David Kerr, at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he dual-majored in mathematics and political science). He also credits his participation in the National Conference for Undergraduate Researchers, excellent mentoring as a graduate student through a cooperative fellowship program of Bell Labs, and his own father—who is also an engineer—“for his work ethic.”

Operations researchers, Lewis says, should be able to enter the workplace and squeeze out more productivity in a situation with tight margins. Their goal is to “make systems work more efficiently so that businesses can offer services and products at lower prices to the consumer.”

Lewis’s current research in cross-trained workforce allocation and inventory control is of special relevance in today’s productivity-conscious industrial climate. He asks (and answers) such questions as, “If a person is trained to do several jobs, which should they perform in the face of several uncertainties? How many future jobs will arise out of each one that they are trained for, how many jobs are currently waiting, and how long will the employee be allocated to this set of jobs?”

Lewis teaches Queueing Theory (ORIE 561) and a new course on stochastic dynamic programming. “I am interested in teaching any course related to stochastic processes, but I usually stick to the discrete-time processes,” he adds.

Productivity and labor are not just research interests to Lewis, they are integral to his beliefs and part of the reason for his success in the field. One of the most important lessons he hopes to share with students is that hard work can outperform genius. “There’s a Calvin Coolidge quote to that effect,” he says. “It is almost an axiom.”