Department head spotlight: Quinton Nottingham, Business Information Technology

Quinton Nottingham, a three-time Virginia Tech graduate and long-time faculty member, has been appointed head of the Department of Business Information Technology in the Pamplin College of Business.

Nottingham succeeds Roberta (Robin) S. Russell, who has served as the interim dean of the Pamplin College of Business since July 1.

Business Information Technology (BIT) is one of the largest majors at Virginia Tech and one of the most successful at placing students in a job within their degree field after graduation. Nottingham wants to continue to build upon this successful track record.

“One of the things that we have always done well in BIT is to develop strong relationships with businesses who hire our students,” said Nottingham. “We cater our curriculum to the job market, and we have a really good model for placing our students.”

To bolster the pipeline of highly-skilled data analytics talent graduating from Pamplin, the department recently transitioned Cybersecurity Management and Analytics (BIT-Cyber) from an option into a major. Plans are underway to do the same with Operations and Supply Chain Management (BIT-OSM) and Decision Support Systems (BIT-DSS).

We will work to continue to place students in jobs at a high rate and continue our upward trajectory,” added Nottingham.

Nottingham joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1995 as an associate professor in Management Science, the department’s original designation before being renamed.

As a researcher, Nottingham’s interests involve supply chain, supply chain resilience, and healthcare, with the bulk of the focus on healthcare. He has written papers and presented on examining patient satisfaction as a function of waiting times, cancellations, and no-shows, and he recently received a five-year grant from Ballad Health (based in Bristol, Tenn.) to start and study a medical-legal partnership with Appalachian School of Law.

“A medical-legal partnership is a collaboration between medical and legal professionals to improve patient health outcomes,” he explained. “More specifically, healthcare professionals are taught to identify social determinants of health and refer patients to legal professionals in hope of improving the patient health outcomes if their legal issues are resolved. I like to use the term ‘IHELP’ when discussing the medical-legal partnership (I for income and insurance, H for housing and utilities, E for education and employment, L for legal status, and P for personal and family stability). We started conversations about the medical-legal partnership in fall 2019, started work in the spring of 2020, and were awarded the grant in January 2021.”

His work has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, the Journal of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, the International Journal of Production Research, and Computers and Industrial Engineering. 

“I enjoy statistics because it is an applied mathematics,” said Nottingham. “You can tell a lot of different stories using data.”

Nottingham has served in numerous roles with the department, including as faculty advisor for both the BIT Club and Pamplin Multicultural & Diversity Council. He has held numerous positions for the Southeast Decision Science Institute – from student liaison to program chair (2010) to president (2012) – and has served many roles at Southeast INFORMS and the Decision Science Institute. He has also served on numerous Ph.D. committees and has been the chair or co-chair for several Ph.D. students.

He served as the faculty advisor to the BIT Club at Virginia Tech from 1997-2001. He also served as track chair for the Southeast Institute for Operations Research and Management Science and as a reviewer for numerous tracks of the Decision Sciences Institute's national conference. Nottingham currently serves as vice president of finance for the Southeast Decision Sciences Institute. 

He is a member of or has held memberships in the American Statistical Association, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, and Decision Sciences Institute. He has also served as a reviewer for the Decision Sciences Journal, OMEGA, and the Journal of Computational Statistics. He serves on the Board of Governors for the University Club of Virginia Tech as well as the Campaign Steering Committee. Nottingham is also active with the Ph.D. Project, an organization started by KPMG that aims to increase the number of underrepresented minorities with Ph.D.’s in academia.

Nottingham received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Ph.D. in statistics from Virginia Tech. As an undergraduate, Nottingham was an invited walk-on member of the men’s basketball team, playing in 78 games from 1986-89.

“All in all, it’s an exciting time to be in this position,” said Nottingham. “We had seven new hires this academic year and I’m looking to fill at least four more positions for the next academic year. We are adding faculty to help support the growing demand for our BIT-Cybersecurity Management and Analytics major and the next generation of highly-skilled talent.”