Meet the Team Revolutionizing Process Management

Opher Baron is a Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and a cofounder and CEO of SiMLQ. He was a visiting associate Professor at the Industrial engineering and Management faculty of Technion (2009/10) and a visiting Professor at the School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (2016/17). He also served as the Academic Director, MMA Program (2021-2023), and the Operations management and statistics area coordinator (2015-2021). He has a PhD in Operations Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA and BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion. On the teaching front, Opher is especially proud of the modeling and analytics courses he introduced and teaches at Rotman. On the application front he launched the Covidppehelp.ca platform with his colleagues. This platform has facilitated the flow of millions of PPE items to end-user customers during the global Covid19 pandemic. In 2024 he cofounded SiMLQ Inc. SiMLQ automatically constructs data-driven process Simulators (digital twins) by leveraging event log data, Machine Learning and Queueing theory. His research interests include queueing, business analytics, service operations (such as healthcare), autonomous vehicles, and revenue management. Opher's work is published in leading journals such as Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and he has won several research and teaching awards and grants, including the 1000 Talents Plan Scholar from the Shanghai Municipal Government, 2017 and the Rotman 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Contribution Award. Opher is active in the operations research and operations management community. He has given numerous invited keynote lectures and seminars, chaired several conferences, clusters, and sessions, and is currently serving on the advisory board and editorial boards of several leading journals.

Arik is an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the School of Information Technology (ITEC) at York University and holds a status-only Assistant Professor position at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He has previously served as an Assistant Professor at both the Rotman School of Management and the iSchool at the University of Toronto. Additionally, Arik is the CTO and co-founder of SiMLQ, a startup specializing in advanced digital twin technology to support decision-making in complex environments, including healthcare and manufacturing. Arik earned his PhD in Data Science (2017), MSc in Statistics (2012), and BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management (2006) from the Technion. In 2017, he received the inaugural Best Dissertation Award at the Business Process Management (BPM) conference for his groundbreaking work in data science and process mining. That same year, he was awarded the prestigious Lyon Sachs scholarship, given annually to one PhD graduate, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Toronto Intelligent Decision Engineering Laboratory (TIDEL) at the University of Toronto.

Dmitry Krass is a Professor of Operations Management and Statistics and Sydney C. Cooper Chair in Business and Technology. Obtaining his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Johns Hopkins University, he joined the School in 1989. He consults extensively in the areas of Predictive Analytics, Optimization of Marketing Communications and Operational Effectiveness. His research and teaching interests include facility location models, transportation, reliability and inventory location modeling and humanitarian logistics. He is also interested in environmental modeling, including regulation of pollution fines, marketing mix management and optimization, and predictive/ prescriptive analytics using “big data” and other tools in business decision making.