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Our History
In December 1999, the Board of Trustees, Stanford University authorized the creation of the Department of Management Science and Engineering from the Department
of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management and the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research. The objective of the newly formed department was to become the leader among academic departments, at the interface of engineering, business, and public policy.
The Stanford department of IE-EM started as an Industrial Engineering department including an
Operations Research group. It remained as an IE department following a split in the early sixties of
this OR group. Subsequently, an Engineering Management focus was added to the IE department
in response, in part, to a growing demand in the Silicon Valley for engineers with management
skills. The result was a small (and original) department that covered a larger spectrum of topics and
had a stronger emphasis on management than most IE departments in the United Stated. It
offered an ABET - accredited undergraduate program and included three main areas of teaching and
research (Stanford University, 1999).
These groups included:
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a production group based on OR methods and centered on production operations and
manufacturing
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an organization behavior group based on social sciences focusing on work, technology
management and entrepreneurship, and
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a risk analysis group focusing on probabilistic risk analysis and risk management for critical
engineered systems, projects and programs.
In addition, the IE-EM department ran several successful summer executive education programs (for
example with the American Electronics Association) and broadcast some of its courses through the
Stanford Instructional Television Network (SITN). These courses allowed distance learning for
companies that subscribe to SITN services, in real time in the Silicon Valley and with some delay
for companies elsewhere in the United States.
The EES&OR department was born in 1996 from an earlier merger between the departments of
Engineering-Economic Systems (EES) and Operations Research (OR). As mentioned earlier, the
OR department was created in the early 1960’s by a group of faculty members out of the existing
Industrial Engineering department. The EES department was created in the late sixties to apply
methods of systems and economic analysis to engineering problems involving policy and decision
making, both in government and industry. The EES&OR department covered a large variety of
topics of research and teaching (Stanford University, 1998): optimization (numerical optimization,
stochastic optimization, network optimization, lattice programming), probability and stochastic
processes, systems and simulation, economics, finance and investments, decisions (decisions
analysis and dynamic programming), operations and services, strategy and policy. It ran
successful executive education programs in theory of investments and in the use of spreadsheets
for the solution of OR problems, an Affiliates program, and included an Energy Modeling Forum as
well as a Decisions and Ethics Center.
As of 1996 the Stanford School of Engineering included three departments, now reduced to two,
whose vocation was essentially the management of technological enterprises and systems, both by
industry or by government. It seemed therefore that there were opportunities for synergies and that
a merger made sense. A first merger, which occurred in 1996, involved the departments of EES
and OR. During the academic year 1998-1999, the Dean of Engineering decided to create a new
department that the faculty from IEEM and EESOR were given the opportunity to join, which they all
eventually did.
Stanford University thus created a new department in its School of Engineering that was de
facto the result of a merger of the existing departments of IEEM and EES&OR. The faculty
members of this new department chose and ratified by an approval rate of more than 90%
the name: “Management Science and Engineering” (MS&E).
The department now covers eight core areas of research :
- Decision Analysis and Risk Analysis
- Economics and Finance
- Information Science and Technology
- Optimization and Tools of System Analysis
- Organizations, Technology and Entrepreneurship
- Probability and Stochastic Systems
- Production and Operations Management
- Strategy and Policy
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