Rosa Oppenheim

Dr. Oppenheim is a professor at Rutgers University and Interim Chair of the Department of Supply Chain Management, and was named, in 2016, RBS Dean’s Professor of Business. She has previously served as Executive Vice Dean and Acting Dean at Rutgers Business School. Her research interests are in statistical process control, total quality management, and six sigma management. She is the author of many articles and several texts, including Managing Supply Chain Operations (coauthored with RBS Dean Lei Lei, Leonardo DeCandia, Chief Procurement Officer of Johnson & Johnson, and RBS Professor Yao Zhao), and has conducted training programs for major corporations. She is the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching, including being named one of Poets & Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Professors of 2022.

Executive MBA Experience

Rosa Oppenheim: An Educational Eye-Opener

"Teaching in the EMBA Program is considered a plum," says Rosa Oppenheim, professor and executive vice dean at Rutgers business school. "It's always an exhilarating experience to walk into the classroom. The students are enthusiastic and challenging."

She continues, "We attempt to get the best possible faculty. Most of our professors are at the forefront of their fields. We also get very respected professionals from the corporate world."

The result, she says, is an up-to-date education that gives managers "a greater perspective on what is going on in their organization, what techniques are available for problem solving, what other companies are doing. It is an eye-opener."

Prof. Oppenheim teaches two course in the EMBA program—Business Statistics and Data Driven Analysis. In keeping with the overall philosophy of the Rutgers EMBA program, her emphasis is on how the students can/should apply the classroom theory to their respective professions. To this end, EMBA learning teams are required to make presentations describing how some of the statistics or operations management techniques could be used in the workplace (or are currently in use), with specific reference to one of the companies in each team.

“I have been very impressed by these presentations”, remarks Rosa. She cites one recent presentation where one of the physicians in the EMBA class used queuing theory to model his receivables from HMOs, his disbursements, his drug inventory, and his ‘waiting times’ while maximizing his objective function--overall patient satisfaction. Prof. Oppenheim found this to be “truly a remarkable application of the powerful tools we have covered—most impressive. And this is just one of dozens of amazing examples.”

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Academic degrees

Ph.D., Polytechnic University - Operations Research
M.S. Polytechnic University - Operations Research
B.S. Polytechnic University - Chemical Engineering
M.A. Rutgers University - English
M.A. Rutgers University - Liberal Studies

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Media Mentions

Poets&Quants for Undergraduates, 2022 Best Undergraduate Professors: Rosa Oppenheim, Rutgers Business School, Rosa Oppenheim

Sunday, December 11, 2022

The New York Times, We’re Friends at the Office. Remember the Office?, Rosa Oppenheim

Sunday, November 15, 2020

The New York Times. Letter to the Editor: Rooting for Alex Trebek, Rosa Oppenheim

Monday, March 11, 2019

The New York Times, Making Classical Music and Art Accessible to All, Rosa Oppenheim

Monday, April 23, 2018

Student Testimonials

Dear Rosa,
This may be over 20 years late; but I really need to thank you. I was a medical practitioner and teacher transitioning to management when I took my EMBA. I subsequently became Regional Medical Director at CIGNA, and for 13 years Chief Medical Officer for Medicare for Aetna. In this capacity I was able to create new programs and approaches to medical management that had real impact on Health Policy. In 2002 we created the first large scale program to ID and manage Advanced Illness that showed dramatic impact. Encouraging and facilitating this is now national policy. In 2005 I created one of the first programs in Provider Collaboration, which likewise showed real impact. This concept is now Accountable Care. What you taught was helpful. Learning to understand techniques and "thinking" management enabled me to lead teams that resulted in programs with real and lasting impact. In summary - a belated "thank you."

— Randy Krakauer, MD, EMBA

She teaches very mathematically oriented courses and just walks us down a strong progression. She is very impressive. After her course, quality control at work took on a new and much more rigorously defined meaning. Our quality-related complaints virtually disappeared and we were commended as an internal benchmark for quality control!

Hi Rosa!

I had to reach out to you because I can’t thank you enough for everything you taught me last year (2019)! As you know, I run chronic care management programs for high-risk Medicare-aged individuals. We launched a brand-new program in January of this year (2020, the Covid Year) and I just got the results of the first study done by my healthcare economics team. This is a team of epidemiologist and statisticians. I’ve been partnering with them over the last several months to complete the initial study.

It’s a challenging time to be looking at the impact a clinical program like mine delivers. Inpatient admissions are down across the board due to COVID. The question we needed to answer was, is my program working at keeping folks out of the hospital or are they simply not going because of COVID (which could, in turn, increase mortality rates)?

Prof. Langdana reminds us of your famous dictum, Rosa: "Correlation does not imply Causation" And this has been fundamentally important in "identifying" the causality using your statistical analysis. In addition, Farrokh had told us in our interviews with him, that the Statistics that you taught us, Rosa---ranked #3 in the world in all EMBA Programs by Financial Times---is the very foundation, the bedrock, for Digitization and Big Data Strategy (which subsumes Data Analytics). And he was so right!

I’ve been in the weeds with these brilliant statisticians and epidemiologists aligning on study design and, because of you and your classes, Rosa, I actually understood what they were talking about for the first time in my career! We were able to not only control for COVID, but also match the population to a control group of over 1000 characteristics!

Thank you very much from a humble student of yours!

— Michael Stanzione, REMBA 2021