Francois Sainfort has been appointed to the William W. George Professorship in Health Systems. Professor Sainfort joined the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2000 as a professor and director of the Health Systems Research Center. Prior to his arrival at Georgia Tech, he was a professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with joint appointments in the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Biomedical Engineering. During that time, he also was center director for the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement and program director for the Health Systems Engineering graduate program. Professor Sainfort's research interests focus on consumer and medical decision-making, health care informatics, quality assessment and management in health care, and evaluation of medical technologies. He has served as principal investigator on more than $6 million in contracts and grants.

"It is a great honor for me to receive the William George Professorship, " Dr. Sainfort said. "Bill George's shining example of excellence in philanthropy, scholarship, innovation, and dedication serves as a beacon for my leadership in Health Systems at Georgia Tech. I am proud to be entrusted with his vision and am committed to infusing the Health Systems program with the type of energy that has become Bill George's hallmark. " Dr. Sainfort said this vision includes the development and application of state-of-the-art: Francois Sainfort

- Operations research and management sciences methods and theories for health care delivery systems modeling, analysis, and improvement;
- Operations research methods and theories for disease modeling, treatment, management, and control; and
- Human-computer interaction methods and theories as well as information and decision support technologies to improve the delivery of health care services.

The author of more than 75 refereed publications, Dr. Sainfort has been published in health care journals such as Health Services Research, Medical Care, Medical Decision Making, and Medical Care Research and Review. His research also has appeared in industrial engineering journals such as Operations Research, Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.

Dr. Sainfort is an expert consultant for the health care industry. His clients include health care delivery organizations, medical devices companies, clinical laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies. He has been awarded the Joseph Orlicky Award for the Best Innovation in Manufacturing and Services Operations by the Production and Operations Management Society; the Stoelting Award in Management of Technology; and competitive doctoral fellowships from Entraide Universitaire Mondiale du Canada and the Ministry of National Education in France. William W. George, BIE 1964, is chairman of Medtronic, Inc. He established the endowed professorship in 2001 so that ISyE could hire full-time faculty to advance the health system's graduate program and guide its future.