Wallace J. Hopp is the Breed University Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he has been since receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1984. In addition to his academic appointment, he has held several administrative positions at Northwestern, including Undergraduate Chair of the IE Department, Director of the Master of Manufacturing Engineering Program, and Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program. Currently, he is Director of the Master of Management and Manufacturing (MMM) Program, a professional management program offered jointly by the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering Prior to coming to Northwestern he was a research engineer for Battelle Memorial Laboratories. He spent the 1994/95 academic year as a visiting research engineer in the Corporate Manufacturing Research Laboratory at Motorola.

Professor Hopp's research focuses on the design and control of manufacturing systems and on the economics of equipment replacement, particularly through the use of probability and simulation models. He teaches in the areas of manufacturing management, production control and stochastic modeling. He has won several research and teaching awards, including the 1985 Nicholson Prize (for best student paper in Operations Research), the 1989 McCormick Teaching Award (for best engineering professor), the 1990 Scaife Award (for the paper with the "greatest potential for assisting an advance of manufacturing practice), and the Pentair-Nugent Professorship in Business Leadership in 1993 for outstanding teaching in manufacturing management. He has published widely in the technical literature and is co-author of the book Factory Physics: Foundations of Manufacturing Management, Irwin, 1996.

Professor Hopp is an active consultant to industry, having worked for American Pfauter, Bell & Howell, Black & Decker, DisplayTEK, Eli Lilly, Ford, General Motors, John Deere, IBM, Motorola, Owens Corning, Pentair, S&C Electric, Whirlpool, and Zenith, among others. His specialty is in the diagnosis and analysis of the logistical performance of manufacturing systems. He makes use of the tools of factory physics, simulation, queuing models, optimization, statistics, and quality control to address problems of cycle time reduction, pull system implementation, inventory management, scheduling, purchasing, maintenance, and facility design. In his capacity as Director of the MMM Program, he also works to generate synergy between industry and the classroom, via student projects/internships, case studies, pedagogy-driven research, and industry-oriented education initiatives.

Manufacturing