Welcome
I am the NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business. My research works to build better education systems through process improvement and business innovation, examining the relationship between business and education and the operational processes behind how education is delivered. My research spans four areas: (1) business processes and technology implementation in education; (2) educational supply chains; (3) the integration of services across the public and private sectors; and (4) how frontline workers engage with artificial intelligence.
My operational analyses of educational processes generates broader insights about efficiency and worker resourcefulness that translates to the wider business world. My research has been published in top operations-management journals, including Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and featured in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and NPR. Before earning my PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, I was a public high-school math teacher for three years in the Bronx, New York, through Teach For America.
Evidence on how teachers, schools, and nonprofits actually adopt technology and stretch scarce resources — and what operational improvements platforms, edtech firms, and district leaders can support to improve teacher retention and student learning.
New theories of frontline operations, technology adoption, and human–algorithm interaction — grounded in rich field data (including interviews and observations) and transferable beyond education to other resource-constrained service settings.
Featured in
I work to build better education systems through process improvement and business innovation, studying them from an operations-management perspective. Education systems are a model for understanding how frontline workers get things done under significant resource constraint — which can translate into operational strategy for the wider business world.
Each of my research streams generates both practical insights for education leaders and theoretical innovation for operations management.
Retailers, wholesalers, and online platforms — including teacher crowdfunding — that supply classrooms and the people who run them.
Education insight
How teachers fund and source what their students need — and how platforms can reduce inequity and teacher turnover.
OM contribution
Empirical models of crowdfunding markets, two-sided platforms, and supply chains serving the public sector.
Educational services that bridge the public and private sectors — delivered through relationships among schools, nonprofits, and community organizations.
Education insight
How schools and nonprofits build trust and manage scarce staff time to actually deliver for students.
OM contribution
Theory of inter-organizational trust, time logics, and workforce operations in mission-driven settings.
Educational-technology and generative-AI companies, and how frontline workers use their tools (or not).
Education insight
How teachers really use generative AI tools for productivity, and how to design technology that fit their dynamic workflows.
OM contribution
Behavioral models of algorithm reliance and human–AI collaboration, from field studies and controlled experiments.
Work featured in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, NPR, Education Week, K–12 Dive, and District Administration.
A look at what I am working on now — papers under review and in preparation, plus earlier-stage projects in data collection and analysis, many in collaboration with schools, districts, and education organizations.
A network analysis of how schools manage relationships with outside organizations — and what changes when principals are not the central brokers. The study compares partnering patterns across different school types to understand how external relationships are really built and sustained.
With James Spillane (Northwestern).
Frames teacher productivity as a resource-allocation problem — a “knapsack” of limited time and attention — to study where generative AI genuinely helps teachers and where it adds new burdens, combining field evidence with operational modeling of how teachers fit AI into their work.
With Park Sinchaisri (UC Berkeley) and Clare Snyder (NYU Stern).
Examines how coordination emerges — or breaks down — among the many organizations that together deliver services to students, and identifies mechanisms that help service networks coordinate effectively without relying on top-down control.
With Paul Leonardi (UC Santa Barbara).
An experimental study of how workers respond when algorithms are explicitly designed to be “fair,” and whether fairness changes their reliance on, trust in, and effort alongside the algorithm.
With Clare Snyder (NYU Stern) and Stephen Leider (Michigan Ross).
In design, data collection, or analysis.
A natural experiment testing whether investments in classroom supplies contributed to states’ student-learning recovery after the pandemic.
With Yunnan He (Michigan Ross) and Jun Li (Michigan Ross).
Develops models for how schools and districts can structure their supply chains to get the right materials into classrooms more reliably and efficiently.
With Rana Yoner (Michigan Ross) and Lennart Baardman (Michigan Ross).
Experimental evidence on how people decide which tasks to hand to generative AI and how they carry them out — clarifying where AI changes the nature of frontline work.
With Park Sinchaisri (UC Berkeley) and Clare Snyder (NYU Stern).
Studies how organizations should allocate scarce opportunities to pilot AI tools — and where the limits of pilot-based learning lie.
With Faidra Monachou (Yale SOM).
See Google Scholar for the complete and most current list.
Snyder, C., Keppler, S., & Leider, S. (2026). Algorithm Reliance, Fast and Slow. Management Science, 72(1), 368–385.
Keppler, S., Li, J., & Wu, A. (2025). Stopping the Revolving Door: An Empirical and Textual Study of Crowdfunding and Teacher Turnover. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 27(6), 1683–2035.
Keppler, S. M., & Smilowitz, K. R. (2024). Time is Not Money: Time Logics and Workforce Operations Within School–Nonprofit Relationships. Production and Operations Management, 33(12), 2362–2380.
Keppler, S. M. (2024). Little's Law and Educational Inequality: A Comparative Case Study of Teacher Workaround Productivity. Management Science, 70(5), 2756–2778.
Davis, A., Flicker, B., Hyndman, K., Katok, E., Keppler, S., Leider, S., Long, X., & Tong, J. (2023). A Replication Study of Operations Management Experiments in Management Science. Management Science, 69(9), 4977–4991.
Keppler, S. M., & Leonardi, P. M. (2023). Building Relational Confidence in Remote and Hybrid Work Arrangements: Novel Ways to Use Digital Technologies to Foster Knowledge Sharing. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 28(4), zmad020.
Keppler, S., Li, J., & Wu, A. (2022). Crowdfunding the Front Lines: An Empirical Study of Teacher-Driven School Improvement. Management Science, 68(12), 8515–9218.
Keppler, S. M., Smilowitz, K. R., & Leonardi, P. M. (2021). Contextual Trustworthiness of Organizational Partners: Evidence from Nine School Networks. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 23(4), 974–988.
Keppler, S., Sinchaisri, P., & Snyder, C. (2025). Making ChatGPT Work For Me. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), 9(CSCW2), 1–23.
Keppler, S. M. (2024). Rethinking Frontline Nonprofit Operations: The Role of Aggregator Organizations. In G. Berenguer Falguera & M. Sohoni (Eds.), Nonprofit Operations and Supply Chain Management: Theory and Practice. Springer.
Smilowitz, K. R., & Keppler, S. M. (2020). On the Use of Operations Research and Management in Public Education Systems. In C. Druehl & W. Elmaghraby (Eds.), INFORMS TutORials in Operations Research (pp. 84–105). INFORMS.
I teach operations management to MBA students at the Ross School of Business, with an emphasis on analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and the practical decisions managers actually face.
The MBA core course in operations management, covering how organizations design and improve the processes that deliver their products and services.
A new elective I developed with Hyun-Soo Ahn to equip students with the critical-thinking and decision-making capabilities for careers in operations consulting and tech. Each session takes on a major topic — globalization and the world economy, analytics and data science, supply-chain risk, AI and change management, digital transformation, and sustainability — and builds skills such as stance-taking, analytical reasoning, questioning, moving forward under ambiguity, and data storytelling. The course features panels and lectures from managers working at leading consulting and technology firms.