Nicola Secomandi Appointed to the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professorship

Nicola Secomandi has been appointed the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professorship. Secomandi joined the Tepper School in 2003. He received his doctoral degree in 1998 from the University of Houston in Operations Research and Statistics. He also holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Houston (1993).

His early highly regarded research involved traditional problems in operations management such as vehicle routing. Secomandi’s ongoing research is focused on energy and commodity merchant trading operations, with a focus on the merchant operations of energy trading networks considering both the operational effects of market incompleteness and environmental aspects. Successful studies in merchant operations involve bringing methods from mathematical finance, which focuses on valuing options under uncertainty about the price of the underlying commodity, to bear on the normative concerns of operations management, which focuses on scheduling, logistics, and processing rates. Secomandi‘s research agenda is the type of interdisciplinary effort we greatly appreciate at the Tepper School.

“We are honored to recognize Nicola with this esteemed professorship," said Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, Dean of the Tepper School. “ He undertook and succeeded at a high-impact research agenda and is a highly involved faculty member. We are grateful to have him as part of the Tepper community."

Secomandi is widely regarded as a leading expert in his field. He has built an impressive record of academic publications and is a visible scholar among his peers. At the same time, he is developing methods that are being used and implemented by practicing managers in both financial and energy companies. His work has won several awards; most recently a paper he co-authored was the winner of the 2020 Best Publication Award in Environment-Sustainability, INFORMS, Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Section.

Secomandi recently served as Head of the Ph.D. program and serves in several editorial roles, including Area Editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing and Associate Editor for Operations Research and Management Science. His research has been supported by substantial NSF grants and has been funded by the Scott Energy Institute.