Chinese Scholar Honored with POMS Top Service Award

On May 11, 2025, Professor Mao Zhaofang, Party Secretary of the College of Management and Economics at Tianjin University and former Vice President of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), was honored with the Sushil K. Gupta POMS Distinguished Service Award at the society’s annual conference. He is the first recipient from a Chinese university to receive this prestigious distinction.

Professor Mao has long been committed to advancing the internationalization of management sciences. In 2019, he was elected Vice President of POMS in charge of Asia and Oceania, where he successfully connected regional and global academic resources. That same year, he initiated and chaired the inaugural POMS International Conference in China, co-organized by Tianjin University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, and the University of Science and Technology of China. This four-university collaboration has since hosted four highly successful conferences in Tianjin, Xi’an, Hangzhou, and Hefei, accepting over 2,300 academic papers in total. The China POMS conference series is now among the most influential in the society’s global calendar.

Professor Mao has also served on the advisory committees of all China POMS conferences, the 2019 Mostly OM Conference Steering Committee, the 2022 POMS India Conference Advisory Committee, and chaired the 2024 POMS EEDSA Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee.

The College of Management and Economics at Tianjin University, where Professor Mao is based, was one of the first four institutions in China to establish a management school. Since 2009, it has implemented a pioneering disciplinary reform, integrating management and economics under a unified academic structure. The college now comprises three first-level disciplines under management, Management Science and Engineering, Business Administration, and Public Administration, along with Applied Economics and a secondary discipline in Systems Engineering. Its Management Science and Engineering program is a national “Double First-Class” discipline and ranked second in China in the 2023 and 2024 Shanghai Ranking.

About POMS

Founded in 1989 by Professor Kalyan Singhal and around 300 academics and executives, the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) held its first international conference in Washington, D.C. in 1990. Its flagship journal, Production and Operations Management, published its inaugural issue in March 1992. POMS is widely recognized as a leading professional society in the field, aiming to serve as the intellectual home for professionals in production and operations management and a central source of knowledge and best practices in the discipline.

About the Award

The Sushil K. Gupta POMS Distinguished Service Award was established in 2013 to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to the development of POMS and the broader field of production and operations management.

By: Qin Mian