Dr. John Blake received a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1988. He was employed by General Motors of Canada Limited from 1988-1991 as an industrial engineer and a production line supervisor.
From 1991-1993, Dr. Blake was employed as a research scientist at the University of Toronto. Dr. Blake was the chief research officer on a project funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and four Toronto area hospitals to develop a simulation based tool that evaluated the impact of operating room schedules on inpatient unit nursing workload.
In 1997, Dr. Blake received his doctorate from University of Toronto. The topic of his dissertation was a method for allocating resources to physicians working in an acute care hospital. The methodology allows hospitals facing budget cuts to achieve economic self-sufficiency, while ensuring that physicians are able to generate a desired level of income.
While working on his PhD, Dr. Blake was active in a number of research studies. In 1994, Dr. Blake and Dr. Michael Carter received the Canadian Operational Research Society's Practice Prize for a study of emergency room wait time issues at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Dr. Blake was also involved in a large-scale study to evaluate the nursing and personal care needs of residents of Ontario nursing homes.
Dr. Blake has published several papers in the area of health care and industrial engineering. His current research interests include anaesthesia agents and their effect on patient throughput, staff scheduling, and blood inventory policy. He has been working for the past several months on an automated system to optimally allocate operating room time to surgeons.
Dr. Blake has been a member of the Canadian Operational Research Society since 1991. He has served as president of the Toronto student chapter of CORS and is currently the treasurer of the national society. He is also a member of INFORMS and the Institute of Industrial Engineers. Dr. Blake is a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of Nova Scotia.
KEY WORDS operations research, health care, simulation, multi-criteria decision making, optimization, scheduling.
