Bob O'Keefe

Bob  is Professor of Information Management, Dean of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Law, and Vice Principal for External Engagement. He joined RHUL in January 2012.

From 2002 through 2010 he was Head of School then Dean of the Faculty of Management & Law at the University of Surrey. He was previously Professor of Information Management at Brunel University, and an associate of Henley Management College. He has also held positions at the University of Kent, Virginia Tech, USA and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, and a visiting position at the University of Sydney. Prior to all this he was the first graduate from Lancaster University in (what is now called) the B.Sc. in Computer Business Modelling and completed a PhD in Operational Research at the University of Southampton.

Bob’s PhD was an early contribution to visual interactive simulation and interactive model building. His subsequent interests have been very diverse, but always at the intersection of modelling, decision support and the application of Information Technology.  In the US, he worked on a NSF funded project on the process of modelling, and was part of a team that developed a method for assessing the operational quality of a SME. His present research and consulting interests are in the use of the Internet to support customer and consumer decision making. He is currently also revisiting previous research in behavioral OR, which has gained some recent attention.