M. Eric Johnson won’t start his new job as dean of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management until July 1, but he’s already working on some ideas for the school and considering what he wants to accomplish during his tenure, Businessweek reported in a April 23 article.
First, he plans to leverage Vanderbilt’s strong health care, law, medicine, and engineering programs, which can be paired with business studies.
Johnson, a former professor at Vanderbilt and current associate dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, holds bachelor’s degrees in industrial engineering and economics from Pennsylvania State University along with a master’s in industrial engineering and operations research. He earned a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University.
With Nashville a hotbed for health care entrepreneurship and media, Johnson, whose teaching and research focuses on the effects of information technology on business and industries, told Businessweek he will seek out opportunities in these areas for the school,
His teaching and research focuses on the impact of information technology on the extended enterprise. Through grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he is studying how information technology improves process execution but also how security failures create friction throughout the extended enterprise.
His recent book, The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft (Springer 2012) examines the security failures and economic incentives that drive identity theft. He holds patents on interface design and has testified before the U.S. Congress on information security. He has published many related articles in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review and CIO Magazine.
He is particularly interested in the supply chain challenges faced by industries with short product life cycles such as computers, toys and apparel. Recently, he has been applying lessons from those industries to the delivery problems found in healthcare and humanitarian relief.
His research articles have appeared in such academic journals as Management Science, Health Services Research, Operations Research, IEEE Security and Privacy, Communications of the ACM, Interfaces, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Transportation Science.
He was previously employed as a development engineer by Hewlett-Packard Co. He has consulted for diverse companies such as Accenture, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, DHL, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Nike, Nextel, Nokia, Oracle, Pepsi, and The Parthenon Group.
Johnson served on the boards of Evant (sold to Manhattan Associates), ISTS, POMS, and as the president of the POMS College of Supply Chain Management. He has also served on numerous editorial boards including Electronic Markets, Production and Operations Management, Management Science, Interfaces, Operations Research, International Journal of Logistics Management, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.