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Retsef Levi
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Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a member of the Operations Management Group at MIT Sloan and affiliated with the MIT Operations Research Center. Levi also serves as the Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO).
Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Levi spent almost 12 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an officer in the Intelligence Wing and was designated as an Extra Merit Officer. After leaving the Military, Levi joined an emerging new Israeli hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant. Levi's current research is focused on the design of analytical data-driven decision support models and tools addressing complex business and system design decisions under uncertainty in areas such as health and healthcare management, supply chain, procurement and inventory management, revenue management, pricing optimization and logistics. He is interested in the theory underlying these models and algorithms, as well as their computational and organizational applicability in practical settings. Levi has been leading several industry-based collaborative research efforts with some of the major academic hospitals in the Boston area, such as Mass General Hospital (MGH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Children’s Hospital, and across the U.S. (e.g., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC Presbyterian Hospital System and the American Association of Medical Colleges). Levi was the PI on an MIT contract with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to develop systematic risk management approach to address risk related to economically motivated adulterations of food manufactured in global supply chains. With a multi-million award from the Walmart Foundation, Levi currently leads a multi-year U.S.-China collaborative effort to develop new predictive risk analytics tools and testing technologies and platforms to address core food safety challenges in China. Levi has also been involved in developing operational risk and process safety management methodologies for various organizations in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries. Levi received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, the 2008 INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers, the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize and the 2016 Harold W. Kuhn Award. Levi teaches regularly courses on operations management, analytics, risk management, system thinking and healthcare to students from various degree and non-degree programs including MBA, Executive MBA, PhD, Master and Undergraduate students as well as Executive Education programs. His Healthcare Lab course attracts students from across the MIT campus and engages major industry partners and leaders. Levi has graduated 10 PhD students, 34 Master students and 6 postdoctoral fellows. He was also awarded several prestigious teaching awards.
Honors
Levi and Magnanti win Kuhn Award
Levi's paper wins Wagner Prize
Retsef Levi has received a National Science Foundation Career Grant
Levi and Zheng win MSOM award
Publications
Bravo, Fernanda, Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, and Gonzalo Romero. Production and Operations Management. Forthcoming. Download Paper.
Braaksma, Aleida, Martin S. Copenhaver, Ana C. Zenteno, Elizabeth Ugarph, Retsef Levi, Bethany J. Daily, Benjamin Orcutt, Kathryn M. Turcotte, and Peter F. Dunn. Health Care Management Science. Forthcoming.
Levi, Retsef, Manoj Rajan, Somya Singhvi, and Y. Karen Zheng (Under second revision in Management Science), Working Paper. September 2022.
Sun, Christopher, Darrick Li, Ana Cecilia Zenteno, Marjory Bravard, Peter Carolan, Bethany Daily, Sami Elamin, Jasmine Ha, Amber Moore, Kyan Safavi, Brian Yun, Peter Dunn, Retsef Levi, and James Richter. Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology Vol. 13, No. 7 (2022): e00482.
Levi, Retsef, Elisabeth Paulson, and Georgia Perakis (Submitted to Management Science, revision requested), Working Paper. July 2022.
Gong, Xun, Nicholas Renegar, Retsef Levi, and Michael Strano. npj Computational Materials Vol. 8, No. 135 (2022): 1-13. Download Paper.
Recent Insights

Alumni
Solving Food and Agriculture Challenges
Professors Retsef Levi and Karen Zheng discussed their work in addressing food and agriculture issues across the globe at MIT Sloan Reunion 2023.
Jun 16, 2023

Alumni
Highlights from MIT Sloan Reunion 2023
Over 1,300 Sloanies and their guests returned to campus in early June to attend MIT Sloan Reunion 2023.
Jun 14, 2023
Media Highlights
Breakthrough infections raise health, death risk; vaccine passports with...
"Vaccine passports" that exempt vaccinated people from regular COVID-19 testing would allow many infections to be missed, Israeli data suggest.
US panel backs COVID-19 boosters only for elderly, high-risk
“I hope you will hold off of approving the booster for broad use at least until such a strategy is developed.”
Companies are adopting COVID vaccine mandates for employees. So why aren...
All employees will have to get used to the idea, [Prof. Retsef] Levi said, that no one will be perfectly protected against COVID-19 ...
Retail pharmacy chains will face vaccine rollout challenges
“How do you actually make sure everybody got two doses? Right? And how do you maintain a record of that?”
Executive Education
Building Organizational Resilience
Our organizations – designed for optimal performance — work well under normal conditions, but are vulnerable to failure when the unexpected occurs. How do we design systems that work efficiently under typical conditions, yet respond resiliently to “unknown unknowns”? This new course, Building Organizational Resilience, provides business leaders with a practical approach to assess and build organizational resiliency. Learn how systems thinking and continuous improvement can help your team identify problems before they occur and fundamentally alter your organization’s ability to effectively respond when they do. Understand the role hidden factories and irregular operations play in contributing to catastrophic events, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to reverse their effects. Leave with a playbook for improving the resilience of your company.
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