Biography
Assistant Professor of Decisions, Operations and Technology Management Christiane Barz holds a doctoral degree and a diploma in industrial engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. She studies multiple sectors and industries, from airlines to health care to telecommunications. “This is what excites me about my research,” Barz says. “The methods I have specialized in allow me to work with a wide range of coauthors who bring the application expertise. I then come in as an expert on how to make their processes more efficient.”
Barz teaches in the full-time MBA, Ph.D. and Global Executive MBA for the Americas programs. “My goal is to present the material as accessible to students and refine the intuition of those with highly quantitative backgrounds at the same time,” she says. “I love the diversity in MBA classrooms. Everyone is smart; some students have their strengths in quantitative areas and some don’t. I try to have students with strengths in other areas connect to my material without being afraid of the formulas.” She earned the George Robbins Assistant Professor Teaching Award in 2012, and the GEMBA Class of 2015 bestowed on her the Outstanding Teaching Award. Barz was on leave in Germany when she was told 24 hours in advance she’d been elected for the prize and booked a flight within three hours to be present at the commencement ceremony in Los Angeles.
Barz’s main research interests are revenue management, dynamic pricing, health care services, inventory theory and production scheduling. In her dissertation, Barz analyzed the impact of an airline’s risk attitude on the availability of low-cost tickets. Published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, the thesis won several prizes, including the dissertation prize of the German Operations Research Society in 2007. Her numerous publications include foundational research on risk-sensitive capacity control in revenue management and new work addressing how patients should be admitted and scheduled when hospitals have multiple resource constraints. The common thread in her projects is solutions to large-scale dynamic optimization problems using approximate dynamic programming techniques.
Prior to joining UCLA Anderson’s faculty, she spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher with the operations management group at the Chicago Booth School of Business. As a child in her native Germany, though, it was Los Angeles she imagined when she thought of the United States. “My grandma told me about L.A. when I was still in kindergarten,” she says, and later found maps indicating her grandmother had visited many spots in Westwood.
Education
Doctorate Degree (Dr. rer. pol., with honors), 2006, Graduate School of Information Management and Market Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Diploma in Industrial Engineering (Dipl. Wi.-Ing., with honors), 2004, School of Economics and Business Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Sokrates Scholar, 2001–2002, Department of Economics, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain