Dr. Anita L. Carson is the Larz Anderson Professor of Management in Operations & Technology Management at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Before pursuing her doctorate, Anita worked in operations positions for General Mills and the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. Her manufacturing experiences are therefore diverse: ranging from fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt to nuclear submarines.

She investigates how service process design impacts quality and efficiency. In particular, she has studied care delivery processes in hospitals. Her research finds that a lack of internal integration results in a culture of workarounds that wastes up to 10% of staff’s time. She leverages principles from operations management to help hospitals decrease workarounds and create an improvement-oriented culture. Her research has won numerous awards including a Best Dissertation award from AcademyHealth, a Sloan Industry Studies Fellowship, a best paper award from California Management Review, seven best paper proceedings awards from the Academy of Management, and outstanding abstract from AcademyHealth.