I have had the privilege of serving as principal advisor for doctoral student Itay Gurvich, who is scheduled to receive his PhD degree from Columbia University in spring 2008. Itay is a doctoral student in the Division of Decision, Risk and Operations in the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. In his doctoral work, Itay was also co-advised, and wrote papers with, Mor Armony of NYU and Costis Maglaras and Assaf Zeevi in the Division of Decision, Risk and Operations in the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.

Before coming to Columbia, Itay completed a masters degree at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, writing a thesis with Avishai Mandelbaum. At that time, he became involved in Avi's work on service engineering. Itay's first published paper will be a joint paper with Mor Armony and Avi Mandelbaum, soon to appear in a special issue of Management Science on call centers, edited by [PDF].