Dr. Bharatendra Rai is Professor of Business Statistics and Operations Management in the Charlton College of Business at UMass Dartmouth. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit. His two master's degrees include specializations in quality, reliability, and OR from Indian Statistical Institute and another in statistics from Meerut University, India. He teaches courses on topics such as Analyzing Big Data, Business Analytics and Data Mining, Twitter and Text Analytics, Applied Decision Techniques, Operations Management, and Data Science for Business. He has over twenty years' consulting and training experience, including industries such as automotive, cutting tool, electronics, food, software, chemical, defense, and so on, in the areas of SPC, design of experiments, quality engineering, problem solving tools, Six-Sigma, and QMS. His work experience includes extensive research experience over five years at Ford in the areas of quality, reliability, and six-sigma. His research publications include journals such as IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Quality Engineering, International Journal of Product Development, International Journal of Business Excellence, and JSSSE. He has been keynote speaker at conferences and presented his research work at conferences such as SAE World Conference, INFORMS Annual Meetings, Industrial Engineering Research Conference, ASQs Annual Quality Congress, Taguchi's Robust Engineering Symposium, and Canadian RAMS.

Dr. Rai has won awards for Excellence and exemplary teamwork at Ford for his contributions in the area of applied statistics. He also received an Employee Recognition Award by FAIA for his Ph.D. dissertation in support of Ford Motor Company. He is certified as ISO 9000 lead assessor from British Standards Institute, ISO 14000 lead assessor from Marsden Environmental International, and Six Sigma Black Belt from ASQ.