John Bartholdi is a Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he holds the Manhattan Associates/Dabbiere Chair. He also serves as Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Logistics Innovation and Research Center in Panama.

Bartholdi’s research centers on problems of warehousing and distribution; but he also publishes on wider-ranging interests, including public transit, voting, geography, computer science, and biology. He is co-author of the book Warehouse & Distribution Science and he is a founder of the Wine Supply Chain Council.

Bartholdi graduated in 1968 with a degree in mathematics from the University of Florida (Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa, High Honors) and then served two deployments during the Viet Nam War in Beach Jumper Unit One of Naval Special Warfare. He returned to complete a Ph.D. in Operations Research, also at the University of Florida. In addition to his current position, he has served on the faculties of the University of Michigan, the Shanghai University for Science and Technology, and the National University of Singapore. He was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation, 1984–1989; and his work has also been supported by, among others, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, IBM, Pratt & Whitney, Ford Motor Company, Genuine Parts Co., The Home Depot, Manhattan Associates, and RPS. He has given invited lectures at the National Security Agency and at Fermilab. Consulting clients have included John Deere, Yamaha, and the US Postal Service. He won the 1999 Award for Technical Innovation by the Institute of Industrial Engineers and in 2005 was named a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. In 2012 his paper with Don Eisenstein (University of Chicago) won the Best Paper Award from the Transportation and Logistics Society of INFORMS; and their implementation of the ideas therein won the 2014 Innovation Award from the Georgia Transit Association. In 2016 his on-line textbook won the Merlot Classic Award and two of his papers won the Test of Time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He also received the Golden Goose Award.

Bartholdi has also held additional appointments as Professor Extraordinary of Operations Research in the Department of Logistics, Universiteit Stellenbosch, South Africa, and as Academic Leader in Industrial Engineering at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Miscellaneous

My Erdös number

…is 2, thanks to some papers I co-authored with Craig Tovey on voting theory.

Places where I have lived or traveled

Australia, Argentina, Austria, Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China (and Tibet), Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia (peninsular and Borneo), Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Portugal, Philippines, Russia, El Salvador, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, eSwatini (formerly Swaziland), Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom (England and Scotland), United States, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe