Keith Womer

Keith Womer serves as a professor of logistics and operations management at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis (UMSL). He has previously served as the Dean of the College of Business Administration at UMSL and earlier as a director of the Hearin Center for Enterprise Science at the University of Mississippi. He was principal investigator for several research projects funded by the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Business Management Research office, and other government agencies. He has over forty years of experience in research and teaching operations research and statistics. He has served as a consultant to the Office of Secretary of Defense, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Institute for Defense Analysis, MITRE, the Logistics Management Institute and the U.S. Department of Justice. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State and a B.A. from Miami University. 

Dr. Womer has written extensively in the area of cost estimation and project management in the public sector. His book, The Economics of Made-to-Order Production: Theory with Applications Related to the Airframe Industry, co-authored with Thomas Gulledge, summarizes early work in this area. Latter papers apply this body of theory to project management and system selection in the Department of Defense and throughout the public sector. Much of this work involves the analysis and estimation of the dynamic systems that result from modeling the optimal schedule for producing made-to-order systems that are characterized by learning. Recently, he has explored the use of data envelopment analysis to aid in system selection. He is the associate editor of Military Operations Research and on the editorial boards of the Quarterly Journal of Finance and Accounting and the International Journal of Social Sciences. He has previously served as editor of the INFORMS book series Topics in Operations Research; as the editor-at-large of Interfaces; and associate editor of Operations Research. He is the 2015 winner of the J. Steinhardt Prize awarded for outstanding contributions to military operations research.