The Journal of Operations Management Names Award in Honor of Professor Jack Meredith

The Journal of Operations Management is recognizing the scholarly contributions of Wake Forest University Schools of Business Professor Jack Meredith with an award named in his honor. The first “Jack Meredith Best Paper Award” ceremony will be held at the 2012 Academy of Management Conference on Aug. 5 in Boston.

Meredith served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Operations Management from 1994 to 2002. During his Editorship, the Journal of Operations Management became established as the premier empirical journal in the field of operations management and supply chain management. The annual Best Paper Award was also established under his Editorship in 2001.

“The top journals in the field at that time were taking a year or two to respond to authors’ submissions (amazingly, some still do), so when I took over JOM, I promised a response within 3 months, and the papers came pouring in. A dirty trick I suppose, but I got the best papers and was able to make JOM the best journal. It was easy to get the average response time down to a couple of months but the right tail of the distribution was a lot harder,” said Meredith.

“This is a well deserving honor that confirms the far-reaching and notable impact that Professor Meredith has had and continues to have on the academy. I doubt that there is an Operations Management faculty member anywhere in the country who has not studied Professor Meredith’s body of work,” said Charles Iacovou, Vice Dean, Wake Forest University Schools of Business.

Meredith is Professor of Management and Broyhill Distinguished Scholar and Chair in Operations at Wake Forest Schools of Business. He received his undergraduate degrees in engineering and mathematics from Oregon State University and his PhD and MBA from University of California, Berkeley.

Prior to his teaching career he worked for Ampex Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Douglas Aircraft Company, and TRW Systems Group. He has also consulted for the National Research Council (Washington), the Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Sciences (Cincinnati), Illinois Institute of Technology, Digital Equipment Corp., Aluminum Co. of America, Warner-Amex, Spectrum Publishing, Educational Testing Service (of Princeton), Industrial Technology Institute, Cincinnati Milacron, Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and John Wiley & Sons. He was Director of Operations and Industrial Management at the University of Cincinnati from 1976-1995 before moving to Wake Forest University.

He has co-authored five textbooks for college classes: Operations Management for MBAs (Wiley), Quantitative Business Modeling (South-Western), Project Management: A Managerial Approach (Wiley), Operations Management: A Process Approach with Spreadsheets (Wiley), and Project Management in Practice (Wiley).