Dr. Jitesh J. Thakkar is a Dean (Academics) and Professor, School of Management and Leadership at National Rail and Transportation Institute (NRTI), Vadodara – India’s first University dedicated in the field of Rail and Transportation education. He has served as a faculty at Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, IIT Kharagpur for 10 years. He has professional experience of more than 23 years. He holds a Ph.D in Supply Chain Management from IIT Delhi, M.Tech. in Industrial Engineering from IIT Delhi and Bachelors of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering conferred with Gold Medal from one of the oldest Government Engineering College - Birla Vishvakarma Mahavidyalaya Engineering College, Sardar Patel University. His areas of interests include Logistics & Supply Chain Management, Transportation Management, Project Management, Service Operations Management, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, Optimization, Statistical Modeling and System Dynamics. He has supervised 13 Ph.D and 80 B.Tech./M.Tech. projects at IIT Kharagpur. He is a productive researcher with H-index 33 and 80 research papers published in SCI/SCOPUS listed journals. The research papers are published in high impact factor and A* & A grade journals of ABDC (Australian Business Deans Council) such as International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Transportation Research (Part-E), International Journal of Production Research, Computers and Industrial Engineering, Production Planning and Control, Expert Systems with Applications, Journal of Cleaner Production. He has published three books – Structural Equation Modeling, Multi-Criteria Decision Making and Project Management with Springer. He is contributing as Associate Editor of the journals – i) International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Emerald and ii) OPSEARCH, Springer. He has executed number of large scale research and consultancy projects sponsored by DST, DRDO, NLC, ICSSR, and MHRD. He has extended training/consulting to various organizations such as L&T, DRDO, Food Corporation of India, eyveli Lignite Corporation, Tata Steel, Tata Hitachi, Essar Steel, Ordnance Factory, Lakshmi Machine Works Ltd., Godrej, Qatar Chemical. His online course on “Six Sigma” offered by NPTEL has been attended by more than 35,000 University students and Industry professionals in last five years. He has delivered more than 100 invited sessions at various reputed platforms. He has been invited as a faculty expert by IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Indore, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, NITIE Mumbai, NIT Surat, NIT Trichy, IRMA, AMA, BCCI Kolkata, L&T-IPM.