Christopher Nachtsheim

Christopher J. Nachtsheim is the Frank A. Donaldson Chair of Operations Management in the Supply Chain and Operations Department of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.  Dr. Nachtsheim received and his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Minnesota, served as staff member in the Statistics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1978-1981, and as Senior Statistician at General Mills from 1982-1984. In 1984 he joined the University, serving as Chair in the Department of Operations and Management Science (now Supply Chain and Operations) from 1993-1996 and from 2002-2014, and as Associate Dean of Faculty and Research from 1996-2000.  

Dr. Nachtsheim's teaching and research interests center on statistics and business analytics, optimal design of industrial product and process improvement experiments, regression and predictive analytics, and quality management. In addition to his regular teaching duties at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Nachtsheim conducts workshops regularly for industry and has taught business statistics at the Warsaw School of Economics, the Vienna School of Business and Economics, and Lingnan College at Sun Yet Sen University regularly since 1993.  Among his major publications are two texts: Applied Linear Statistical Models, 5thEdition, 2005, Richard D. Irwin, and Applied Linear Regression Models, 4th Edition, 2004, Richard D. Irwin (both with John Neter, Michael Kutner, and William Li).  He is co-discoverer, along with Brad Jones (SAS Institute) of Definitive Screening Designs, and is the inventor of the coordinate exchange algorithm for constructing exact optimal experimental designs.  

Dr. Nachtsheim is the recipient of the Teacher of the Year Award for the Vienna Executive MBA program in 2017, and the Curtis Cup Award for CEMBA Faculty of the Year in the Carlson Executive MBA program in 2018.  Professor Nachtsheim has published over 70 articles in the statistics literature and has served as associate editor for many of the top journals in his field, including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Technometrics, Journal of Quality Technology, Statistics and Computing, and Journal of Statistical Computation & Simulation.  He is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Quality Technology.  He served as Examiner, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1996.  He is a four-time recipient (1991, 2009, 2011, and 2014) of the Brumbaugh Award of the ASQ for best paper published in the area of industrial quality control, two-time recipient of the Lloyd S. Nelson Award of the ASQ for the published paper having the greatest impact on practitioners (2010 and 2012), a two-time recipient of the Jack Youden Prize for the best expository paper published in Technometrics(2011 and 2013), and the recipient of the 1992 ASME (CAE/CAD/CAM) National Best Paper Award.  Dr. Nachtsheim is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.