Suresh Nair, Ph.D. (1974-79/MET/Azad Hall)
Professor Emeritus Dr. Suresh Nair was Department Head and Cizik Chair in Manufacturing and Technology Management at the School of Business at University of Connecticut (UConn), Storrs, USA, prior to his retirement in June 2020. He is also Founder and Portfolio Manager of Luminaire Funds LP, a boutique hedge fund. He sits on the Boards of Directors of the University of Connecticut Foundation and the IIT Kharagpur Foundation USA. In 2022, he established a Chaired Professorship in Industrial and Systems Engineering at IIT Kharagpur and has funded several scholarships and endowments at the University of Connecticut.
His academic qualifications include Ph.D. and MS from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; a PGDIE in Industrial Engineering from TIPIE (National Productivity Council), Chennai; and BTech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1979. He is an expert in business analytics and has worked on projects on the interface of operations, finance and marketing and has published extensively on these topics. He also founded FinOpTrix, a software services startup in the bank reserves optimization space, with seed capital from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Nair has been a visiting faculty at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) in Calcutta and Lucknow.
Dr. Nair and his wife Vidya reside in San Francisco, California and Vienna, Virginia, enjoying the company of their grandkids. They eventually plan to retire in Florida.