David Sinreich was born on August 8, 1960 in Radautz, Rumania. He moved to Israel when he was four years old and grew up in the Kryot area near Haifa. David began his university studies at the Technion, where he earned a BS degree (summa cum laude) from the Technion’s Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management in 1988. He then continued his education at Purdue University’s School of Industrial Engineering. He was granted an MS degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1993 under the supervision of Prof. Jose M. Tanchoco.
In 1993, upon completion of his doctoral studies, David returned to the Technion’s Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management as a Lecturer. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1998, and received tenure in 2001.
David’s first ‘love’ was designing simple, yet powerful, material-handling flow structures. Starting with his first journal publication in 1991, David’s research efforts were mainly geared towards attempting to simplify the systems he studied, rather than developing complex and expensive solutions for handling these systems. These studies were the first to conceptualize and model the different aspects of the simplest and most basic flow structure, the single unidirectional loop.
David continued his work on new flow structures with his development of Segmented Flow Topology (SFT). His main objective here was to achieve simplicity yet retain efficiency through the implementation of bidirectional flows on a single lane. The novel approach presented in the paper “The Segmented Bidirectional Single-Loop Topology for Material Flow Systems”, earned him the prestigious 1996 IIE Transactions Best Paper Award.
A second area in which David made research contributions was the design and control of computer-integrated manufacturing systems. Nevertheless, the main theme remained the same; namely, how can the complexity of an FMS controller be reduced without losing the system’s flexibility and efficiency that is cardinal to its operation?
Healthcare engineering was the third research area David explored. His research aims in this area went beyond simply applying IE techniques to healthcare problems. He focused on learning how to model human interactions and incorporate them in the engineering design of healthcare systems and how standard modeling tools such as simulation need to be modified and simplified to better accommodate the needs and capabilities of professionals working in this domain. He worked on improving the efficiency of operating rooms, and emergency and imaging departments. In particular, he was instrumental in developing a simulation tool designed to heighten the efficiency of emergency departments.
David was an active member of the Israeli industrial engineering community. He participated in organizing no less than four of the bi-annual Industrial Engineering Conferences and chaired the thirteenth conference that was held in 2004. Moreover, in addition to being the organizer of the first Industrial Engineering Research Conference held in 2003, he was the driving force in its establishment.
In the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion, David took on various responsibilities, such as heading the Industrial Engineering and Management Robotic and CIM Center, organizing the Industrial Engineering Area seminar, serving on the faculty’s Curriculum Committee, and being the Coordinator of the Industrial Engineering and Management undergraduate studies.
During his career David supervised about twenty MS/PhD students and authored about thirty research papers. He is remembered by his students as a conscientious and caring advisor.
David’s sudden and untimely passing on February 2, 2007 was a shock and a great loss to all who knew him.
