Ajinkya Tanksale

Dr. Ajinkya Tanksale is working as Associate Professor in the Production & Operations Management area at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Nagpur. He earned his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. His academic journey reflects a strong foundation in engineering and operations research, enriched by consistent excellence in performance.

With more than a decade of rich international experience, Dr. Tanksale has held academic positions in India, the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as Assistant Professor at Clarkson University, USA, Newcastle University, UK and IIT (BHU) Varanasi, India, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at Sabanci University, Istanbul, under the prestigious TUBITAK fellowship. His teaching portfolio spans operations analytics, logistics management, supply chain management, and decision sciences, and he has supervised multiple doctoral and postgraduate theses that advanced both theory and practice in areas such as healthcare networks, food redistribution, and humanitarian logistics.

Dr. Tanksale is an active researcher in logistics and supply chain management, applied operations research, and nonprofit sector operations. His scholarly contributions include numerous publications in high-impact journals and presentations in international conferences. His professional activities are further complemented by editorial and reviewing engagements with different journals and memberships of various professional societies.

The primary focus of my research is to model complex problems in different areas of Operations and Supply Chain Management and to solve them effectively and efficiently by following suitable computational approach to gain important insights. I chose a research problem that has practical relevance, socio-economic importance, and a potential to contribute to the body of literature. I typically use Operations Research (mixed-integer programming) as the modelling approach and exact and heuristic/metaheuristics-based solution approaches. I have a broad research portfolio that spans problems from food security, food recovery and re-distribution, food banks, logistics, supply chain network design, closed-loop supply chains, packaging materials, rail-road safety and hyper-local retailing.

I am open for collaborative research. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to know more about my research work or would like to discuss research ideas.

My teaching portfolio includes courses from the broad domain of Production & Operations Management, Logistics & Supply Chain Management and Operations Research. I have taught the following courses so far.
At Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi

MIM-578 Quantitative Methods for Decision Making

ME-573 Supply Chain Management

ME-571 Production & Operations Management

ME-DSE 511 Deterministic Decision Modelling

ME-DSE 525 Facility Location: Models and Algorithms

At Clarkson University, US

EM/OM 371 Strategic Sourcing

EM/OM 451 Quality Management & Lean Enterprise

EM/OM 331 Operations & Supply Chain Management

SB 381 Logistics Management

At Newcastle University, UK

MKT 3018 Supply Chain Management

NBS 8372 Research Methods

NBS8643 Operations Analytics

I have successfully completed consultancy projects for various agencies including Western railways and NCL. I have also organized and participated in various faculty development programs and continuing education programs.

I have served at the following positions of responsibilities at different institutes.

Department/School level
• Senior Tutor of PG students - Newcastle University
• Member, R&D committee (2019-20)
• Member, Departmental Post Graduation Committee (2019-21)
• Member, Departmental Under Graduation Committee (2021-2022)
• Faculty Advisor for students pursuing M.Tech in Decision Sciences & Engineering (2020-2022)

Institute level
Member, Senate, IIT BHU Varanasi (2019-20)
• Member, Curriculum development committee for proposed School of Decision Sciences
(2019-20)
• Member – Core courses monitoring committee for UGD/IDD/B.Arch. Programmes
• Member - Member – project screening committee, Malviya centre for innovation incubation
& entrepreneurship at IIT (BHU) Varanasi
• Warden - Vivekanand Hostel, IIT (BHU) Varanasi
• Faculty Coordinator - Friends of India, Clarkson University.