Professor Ajit C. Tamhane
B.Tech., 1968, Mechanical Engineering

 

Prof. Ajit C. Tamhane is the Senior Associate Dean, McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Northwestern University; Professor of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences (IEMS).

Prof. Tamhane earned his B.Tech. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1968, he has a M.S. and PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University.

Since 1975, he is a faculty member in the Engineering School and Statistics at Northwestern. He was IEMS Department Chair during 2001 to 2008 and Senior Associate Dean from 2008 to present. He is a consultant to many pharmaceutical and other industries.

Prof. Tamhane’s contributions have been mainly in developing new statistical methodologies for design and analysis of clinical trials involving various types of multiplicities of tests. e.g., multiple outcomes, multiple looks at data (group sequential trials), multiple subgroups of patients, etc. He has also worked on problems in design of experiments and quality control.

Prof. Tamhane has penned four books and co-edited two volumes of papers. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, International Statistical Institute and American Association for Advancement Of science.

Special Memories

IIT Bombay was a much smaller place during the years 1963- 68. There were only seven hostels. Special memories include walks along the Powai and Vihar lakes, walks on the pipelines and to nearby hills, going to a Y-point dhaba to escape from the hostel mess food and unpleasant workshop exercise (which I was not good at and suffered a cut on my wrist while working on lathe). One final memory: a classmate of mine (who will remain anonymous) stole my drawings in the 4th year machine design class by erasing my name on the drawings and putting his name on them. I had to redo all the drawings in two days after my final exam before leaving for summer training. When I went to submit my drawings, Professor Kanitkar told me that the thief had been caught, thus my efforts were wasted.