Telesilla Kotsi

Telesilla Kotsi is an assistant professor of operations management at the Fisher College of Business. She joined the Management Sciences department after receiving her PhD from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Telesilla combines field research with rigorous analytical methods to study challenges that nonprofit organizations face. For example, in her current work, she uses game theory, dynamic programming, and econometrics.

Nonprofit operations management is an important area of research, given the nonprofits’ contribution to the US economy is larger than the individual contributions in all but three states. “Nonprofits must provide good and services to their beneficiaries in a timely, equitable, and efficient manner, while ensuring they do “no harm” to other stakeholders, and responding to their donors’ pressures for accountability and transparency,” Telesilla says. Therefore, her primary research interest centres on how allocation of resources (cash, assets, personnel, etc.) affect a nonprofit’s own performance and services provided to its beneficiaries.

To understand the unique challenges faced by nonprofits, Telesilla has spent time to visit refugee camps in Greece, interview managers at foodbanks in USA, and analyze transportation and personnel data collected by a large humanitarian organization that operates worldwide.

Prior coming to the US for pursuing her doctoral studies, Telesilla worked at INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group as a Research Assistant and received a MSc in Operations Research with Computational Optimization from the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Her BSC Degree is on Mechanical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.