Don Wardell

Dr. Don G. Wardell is Francis A. Madsen Scholar and Professor of Operations and Information Systems (OIS) at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business (DESB). He served for several years as the Chair of the OIS Department and before that the Management Department. He received BS and MS degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. degree from Purdue University's Krannert Graduate School of Management. Dr. Wardell has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including teaching classes in Spanish at INCAE in Costa Rica. Dr. Wardell was honored with the University of Utah's Distinguished Teaching Award, the DESB's Masters Teaching Excellence Award, the Brady Superior Teaching Award, and the Marvin J. Ashton Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. His research interests are mainly in the areas of quality management and Six Sigma, and especially statistical process control. He has served as an associate editor for Technometrics, is a member of the editorial review boards of Production and Operations Management and IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability and reviews articles for numerous journals.

Education

• BS, Metallurgical Engineering, University of Utah
• MS, Metallurgical Engineering, University of Utah. Project: Estimation of Media Wear in Semi-Autogenous Grinding (SAG) Mills
• PhD, Management Science, Purdue University. Project: Control Charts in the Presence of Autocorrelation

Research Summary

The majority of the research that I pursue falls under the broad umbrella of quality management, with emphasis on statistical process control (SPC). Much of my work has questioned some of the traditional assumptions of SPC and what should be done if those assumptions are not met. I investigate the underlying probability distributions of statistics plotted on SPC charts, including the derivation of new probability distributions and/or their first and second moments.