About

Aravind Chandrasekaran is the interim dean of The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business, appointed in June 2025. He holds the John W. Berry Sr. Chair in Business and has over 15 years of experience as an operations management expert and academic leader at the college. His previous roles include senior associate dean for faculty, research, and non-degree executive education, as well as associate dean for graduate programs and executive education, where he managed a diverse portfolio of programs such as the Full-Time MBA, Working Professional MBA, Specialized Masters, and Executive MBA. Chandrasekaran has played a key role in developing tailored teaching and research programs for global organizations including Tata Consultancy Services, Ford Motor Company, and Zimmer. As an educator, he is highly respected and has received multiple honors, including the Outstanding Core Professor Award and the Pace Setters Award for Teaching Excellence. He was named one of Poets&Quants’ “40 Under 40” Top Business School Professors in 2017 and was appointed the Fisher Distinguished Professor in Operations and Business Analytics in 2021. His research explores innovation, organizational learning, and knowledge creation across sectors such as high-tech R&D, manufacturing, and healthcare delivery, with recent work focusing on artificial intelligence, ethics, and operational excellence. His scholarship has been published in top journals and has earned numerous accolades, including the INFORMS-Industry Studies Best Paper Award and the Carol J. Latta Emerging Leadership Award.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Operations management
• Computer Security
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Engineering
• Social psychology
• Marketing
• Environmental economics
• Medicine
• Process management
• Economics
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Advancing Allogenic Cell Therapy with Automated iPSC Processing and Engineering: Benefits of a Closed Modular Approach.

  Cytotherapy · 2025-04-30

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Quality Performance Feedback: The Influence of Sequence and Female Ownership on Knowledge Transfer

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Poor service experience encounters adversely affect the operating and financial performance of professional service organizations. One approach to improving service experience comprises of providing performance feedback to organizations. However, delivering this feedback widely is costly. To maximize the reach and effectiveness of performance feedback we investigate two levels of performance feedback, institutional and local, and how the delivery sequence of this feedback can influence a service organization’s future performance. Institutional feedback consists of corporate training inspectors conducting multi-day visits and providing feedback on strategic-level issues. In contrast, local feedback emphaizes daily operations and tactical decisions and is delivered by inspectors who live in the region. In addition, we examine the influence of gender diversity within senior leadership teams of organizations on service experience outcomes. We partner with a large hospitality group in the United States and collect data from over six hundred hotels over four years (2019-2023). Our results suggest that generally franchisees do not improve service experience after receiving solely local or institutional feedback. However, when a property receives both, with the local feedback sequenced first, guest satisfaction ratings rise by up to 10%. Additionally, properties with high levels of female ownership achieve half of this increase from just local feedback. This contrasts with learning literature that argues that conceptual learning is required to improve outcomes. Overall, our study finds that professional service organizations can significantly enhance service experience through careful planning and execution of performance feedback.

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing Allogenic Cell Therapy with Automated iPSC Processing and Engineering: Benefits of a Closed Modular Approach.

  Cytotherapy · 2025-04-30 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Large-Scale Non-Viral Genetic Modification and Feeder-Free Production of CAR-NK Cells

  Cytotherapy · 2025-04-30 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• How Middle Managers Affect Frontline Idea Generation: Evidence From Healthcare Operations

  Journal of Operations Management · 2025-09-15

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT This multiple case study develops a mid‐range theory on how frontline idea generation is affected by the actions of an organization's middle management. The study draws from four acute‐care hospitals in Germany and involves 36 semi‐structured interviews with representatives from all hierarchy levels. We use mission statements from these hospitals to measure top management's strategic intent regarding frontline idea generation. Then we analyze the idea generation performance of 156 nurses from the hospitals and link it to specific middle management behaviors. The cross‐case analyses reveal that middle managers' shaping of nurses' innovation identity improves nurses' idea generation performance. However, this connection also means that middle managers' own forays into innovation can impede frontline idea generation. We find that middle managers' supportive behavior is largely independent of top management intent, a dynamic that offers both advantages and risks. These insights extend our knowledge about the role of middle managers in frontline idea generation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward health promotion and prevention: Evidence from a food and health partnership model of care

  Journal of Operations Management · 2024-07-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Health promotion and disease prevention requires health systems address the patients' social needs using new care delivery models. Yet, research in this area has stalled for several reasons. We study a partnership model of care that couples clinical care delivered by primary care providers and social services delivered by community‐based organizations, and its impact on patients' preventive health outcomes and behaviors. We use data from the Mid‐Ohio Farmacy, which is a collaboration across the Mid‐Ohio Food Collective (MOFC), a network of 650+ affiliated food pantries, and a large federally qualified health center (FQHC). The FQHC offers primary and preventative healthcare services across eight free clinics, which are co‐located with the MOFC‐affiliated food pantries. Patients were screened for food insecurity during their clinic visit and, if positive, were referred to the Farmacy. Compliers made at least one visit to the food pantry after referral, while noncompliers did not. Using difference‐in‐differences, we find that compliers had no discernible change in their body mass index (BMI, kg/m 2 ), which we refer to as a BMI stabilization effect. Noncompliers' BMI increased after referral. High comorbid and high pantry use compliers experienced a significant reduction in their BMI and a marginally significant reduction in glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c, %). These patients had unique compliance behaviors, including greater search, frequency, and consistency of food pantry use. Travel costs suggests that high comorbid patients ascribed a greater value to the Farmacy program. In terms of primary care utilization, we find that compliers' clinic visit patterns after referral were consistent with the visit patterns observed in the food secure cohort, suggesting that the Farmacy program may have helped compliers address competing demands that are known to inhibit health behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Sustain Healthcare Process Improvement in Heterogenous Teams? Evidence from a Systems Dynamic Model

  Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-05 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  This research investigates how to sustain process improvement (PI) initiatives in healthcare. Despite the abundant knowledge on PI, we know very little on why and how PI sustains over time. This is particularly true in the context of heterogeneous frontline teams of physicians and nurses with different operational characteristics such as attrition rates, skill sets, training, and goals. Our study builds a model that simulates the mutual, dynamic interaction of these stakeholders with each other and with processes with different characteristics in the presence of endogenous management prioritization. We build confidence in the model by calibrating it to data from PI teams at several family medicine clinics at a large US Midwestern healthcare system. The computational experiments performed using data from these teams yield several important insights for theory and practice. First, we find that process metrics, which are leading metrics related to the day-to-day functioning of the units, and outcome metrics, which are lagging metrics often tied to the unit's bottom line, are both critical for the functioning of the PI teams. Emphasizing one over the other can reduce sustainability while a mixed case in which one group of employees is incentivized to leading and another group to lagging can create a regime that is more effective in many scenarios. Second, we find that management interventions that improve short-term PI gains generally also reduce the likelihood of long-run sustainment. Third, we find that attrition and turnover among the team members affect sustainability of PI initiatives and reducing turnover for one class of employee, which attends lagging metrics, facilitates sustainment while reducing it for the other class, which attends leading metrics, can hinder sustainment. We conclude by discussing these implications to the practice of PI among healthcare teams.

  PublisherDOI

• How Middle Managers Affect Frontline Idea Generation: Evidence from Healthcare Operations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Examining the role of single versus dual decision‐making approach for patient care: Evidence from cardiology patients

  Journal of Operations Management · 2024-11-17 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Research in healthcare suggests that repeated interaction between a provider and a patient can support better decision‐making, resulting in improved efficiencies. To date, these repeated interactions enabling continuity of care have not been studied in hospital inpatient settings. During a hospital stay, decisions related to patient treatment are usually made by two key decision‐makers: the attending physician (AP) and the operating physician (OP). Under the single decision‐making approach (S‐DMA), the AP and OP are the same; in contrast, under the dual decision‐making approach (D‐DMA), the AP and OP are different. In recent years, there has been an increasing trend toward the use of D‐DMA over S‐DMA across U.S. hospitals owing to scheduling conflicts. Although research outside healthcare operations management has argued for benefits from both approaches, their impacts on a patient's hospital stay are unclear. In this study, we address this gap by investigating the effects of S‐DMA and D‐DMA on patient care outcomes in terms of patient length of stay (LOS), treatment cost, and mortality. Data for our study come from the state of Florida and involve 520,554 cardiology patients treated by 9483 APs and 18,398 OPs at 241 hospitals between 2014 and 2016. We account for both patient and physician selection issues when choosing a particular decision‐making strategy. Our results suggest that, on average, using S‐DMA is associated with reduced patient LOS and treatment cost but has no effect on mortality. We also find that S‐DMA is more beneficial for patients with low comorbidity and low process uncertainty, whereas D‐DMA is more beneficial for patients with high comorbidity and high process uncertainty. Our results are robust to alternative explanations. We demonstrate that a single decision‐maker offers benefits in the context of healthcare delivery, but dual decision‐makers may yield benefits when caring for patients with high comorbidity and high process complexity. We discuss the implications of these findings for appropriately deploying S‐DMA and D‐DMA in inpatient services.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Registered Reports in Operations Management: Lessons from an experimental trial

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Peter T. Ward

  Fisher College

  26 shared

• Piers Norris Turner

  26 shared

• Dennis D. Hirsch

  The Ohio State University

  26 shared

• Srinivasan Parthasarathy

  Sri Balaji Vidyapeeth University

  26 shared

• Davon Norris

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  26 shared

• Timothy Bartley

  University of Toronto

  24 shared

• Claire Senot

  Tulane University

  18 shared

• Kevin Linderman

  18 shared

Education

• PhD , Operations Management

  University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management

  2009

Awards & honors

• JOM Best Paper Award (Beacon Award) for Impact (2025)
• JOM Meritorious Service Award (2023)
• Chan Hahn Best Paper (Academy of Management) (2021)
• Poets and Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors (2017)
• Outstanding Core Professor (2016)