By MARTY LEVINE
Harvey Wolfe, who brought the Swanson School of Engineering’s industrial engineering department to national prominence, hired and mentored many future leaders of his profession, brought an industrial engineering perspective to the study of healthcare and received his field’s highest awards, died Sept. 2, 2026, at 88.
Larry Shuman, now distinguished service professor of engineering emeritus, was a close friend and longtime collaborator with Wolfe in their pioneering healthcare research. He joined Pitt in 1969, five years after Wolfe had arrived.
“The most impressive thing about Harvey is his ability to identify people with talent who would be good advisers and good teachers,” particularly among those Wolfe hired during his department chairmanship (1985-2000). “Six of them became chairs or deans after they left Pitt,” Shuman pointed out. “Harvey saw the potential in people,” believing that “how you relate to people, how will you be in the classroom, is better than the number of papers” published as criteria for faculty success.
“He assumed the chairmanship of the department when the chair passed away,” Shuman recalled. “He was brought in at a point in time when the school of engineering was changing.” Wolfe and the school’s dean wanted his department to begin producing PhDs, and so Wolfe knew he needed to recruit PhDs as faculty. “He rebuilt the department. Industrial engineering was always among the top 20 in the country when Harvey was chair. He won all of the major awards,” including the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Award from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) in 2017, through which the institute honors “those who have distinguished themselves through contributions to the welfare of mankind in the field of industrial engineering. The contributions are of the highest caliber and nationally or internationally recognized.”
Wolfe and Shuman’s collaboration on the new field of Health Systems Engineering lasted through the 1970s and early 1980s. Working with local emergency medical care planners in the City of Pittsburgh, they created an ambulance data system that digitized their performance reports and built models to determine how to evaluate pre-hospital care and how to allocate resources throughout the region. Wolfe and Shuman collected data on the value of emergency calls to simulate new models of response. The federal Department of Transportation later contracted them to do similar work in five other areas of the country, helping to plan their EMT systems.
Wolfe was also generous with advice, Shuman said, including retirement advice garnered from his long service on the University Senate’s Benefits and Welfare Committee, which lasted long past his 2006 retirement as emeritus professor.
Among those hired by Wolfe, Karen Bursic, now an emeritus professor in industrial engineering, said, “The success of my career is primarily Harvey's doing. I wouldn't be where I am without him.”
Wolfe was her professor when she earned her undergraduate degree here, and chair when she returned for her master’s degree. Wolfe offered an assistantship to help Bursic work toward her doctorate, then hired her as a part-time research associate and finally a faculty member.
Wolfe was “a great colleague to all the faculty whom he hired,” she said. “You come across few people, when you go through your career, who think of more than just themselves. I've known a few people who really deeply care about the success of others, and Harvey was one of them. He was just so strong in helping his students.”
As an undergraduate, she said, “I remember being so intimidated to go into his office because I didn't know what kind of person he was.” At her first visit, to discuss an assignment that she had not done well on, she offered what she thought was a good explanation for her work. “‘No, that's just wrong,’” he replied. Others might have blanched, but she could tell that Wolfe really cared about her work, in beginning to explain what else to do. “It gave me a respect for faculty members and what they knew,” Bursic said.
The tough-but-fair treatment continued right through her senior project, done in partnership with another student, Kim Needy. Bursic and Needy, visiting Wolfe’s office to talk about their progress, heard Wolfe reply: “‘I can't believe this is all you've done so far,’” Bursic said. “But it really taught you the value of hard work and the need to stay on top of assignments and not let projects linger.”
Bursic also tells the story – witnessed by her husband, another of Wolfe’s students – of the time Wolfe brought to class a large stack of transparencies for use on an overhead projector. Wolfe was lecturing very animatedly, and he knocked the stack off the desk. Looking down, he said simply, “‘That's OK, we don't need those,’ and he never missed a beat, just kept going.”
Kim Needy, now dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas, was also hired by Wolfe as a department faculty member, recruiting her from an industry job. “He opened that door, and I had an opportunity to jump through it and change my life,” she said. “He believed in me, he encouraged me, he mentored me; he was very important to me in my early years,” helping her secure research funding and not stepping down as chair before he had helped her progress through the promotion and tenure process.
Their friendship developed further through weekly lunches; their offices were next door to each other in Benedum Hall. When Needy had her first child, Wolfe loaned and personally delivered a Wolfe family heirloom, a wooden bassinet he had made himself. “That meant a lot to me,” she said.
In her undergraduate days at Pitt, Needy was president of the Pitt chapter of IISE and Wolfe was its faculty advisor. “He was a very student-focused faculty member,” she said. “He really wanted students to succeed.” Pitt’s IISE chapter wanted to attend regional conferences, and he took a group of four female students to one in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1984. “I have four kids,” he told them. “‘I'll bring the family station wagon.’”
“We girls we're a little intimidated by him at that point,” Needy remembered. “We all drew straws to see who had to sit up front and to hold that conversation” with Wolfe as he drove.” But by the time they stopped for a meal, and the waitress asked, “‘Separate checks?’” one of the students was comfortable enough to respond, “‘No, our dad will pay for us.’ He got a big smile and he picked up the check. He instilled in me and very many others the importance of being involved with our profession and our professional society.
“I followed behind him in many, many ways,” she added. When Wolf was president of IISE, she was on the board and succeeded him as president of the national group, and later as a Gilbreth award recipient. She recalled taking a photo with Wolf and the other two students who led IISE through the years. “He was very proud of that.”
Mary Besterfield-Sacre, the Swanson school’s senior associate dean for academic affairs, completed her PhD here in 1996 and was hired by Wolfe as faculty in 1999. She, too, was scared of Wolfe at first. “He always seemed very stern, but he was someone who really wanted you to get success and do some recognized work. I remember him saying,” by way of encouragement, as head of her doctoral dissertation committee, “‘You're not going to create world peace with your dissertation. The purpose is that you know how to do engineering research and how to be a faculty member.’”
In her files she found “a top 10 list that he would always bring out for what a good faculty member is.” It is headed, “An ideal faculty member as viewed by the department chair” and lays out a list of 15 fairly ambitious requirements. It begins with minimum course loads and funded research money, as well as high degrees of work with students, professional societies and journals. It also says this ideal faculty member “contributes one to two months academic year salary to department,” and “supports self for summer.” It ends with point 15: “Has a wonderful personality and demeanor.”
Although the “ideal” list was slightly facetious, as Besterfield-Sacre allowed, it was also a guide, encouraging faculty members to do their best. Wolfe once joked to her that he would be happy if a faculty member possessed at least characteristic 15.
Wolfe was particularly helpful when she had the chance to adopt her first child and needed release from some duties for the summer, helping her get a foundation grant from a program then available for such assistance.
“One of his big things was to have a group of faculty who were all research active and doing well in the classroom,” she said. “Today, that is a hard balance. He was also as transparent as he possibly could be about the state of the department and the finances. And he looked for ways In which every one of his faculty members could shine.”
Jayant Rajgopal, professor and graduate program director in the department, recalled being Wolfe’s first hire in 1986, when he was 26. “I will always be grateful” for his mentorship, Rajgopal said, “Every other person in the faculty was a full professor. I kept calling him ‘Dr. Wolfe.’ ‘You call me Harvey,’ Wolfe said after a few weeks. ‘You're not a grad student anymore.’”
Wolfe was instrumental in introducing Rajgopal to outside faculty members at conferences and to industry representatives who might help get research projects underway. “He certainly was very good about bringing opportunities to my attention, saying try this, try that,” he recalled. But Rajgopal remembered, too, Wolfe’s reaction to a first draft of a National Science Foundation grant Wolfe reviewed: “He just tore it apart. I really learned a lot about writing properly from him.”
Bopaya Bidanda was Wolfe’s next hire, in January 1987. “He treated all of us as he would treat his children,” Bidanda said, with mentoring that went beyond the professional. “He became a father figure to all the junior faculty.” It helped that he was also president of the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads.
“He was a down-to-earth person,” Bidanda said. “He came from a humble beginning in Baltimore; he never lost that perspective. He would typically not praise you to your face but would praise you behind your back. He was gruff on the outside. Behind your back he would praise you to no end.”
Harvey Borovetz, Wolfe’s colleague since Borovetz’s start in the mid-1970s, recalled that at one time Wolfe and Shuman were earning an outsized portion of the department’s research funding by themselves. “There's no way to raise that kind of funding unless you are very successful,” Borovetz said. “The way they conducted themselves, in every way, it is an example for all of us to follow. They brought much pride and praise to the Swanson school – no doubt about it.”
Born April 14, 1938, Harvey Wolfe attended Baltimore City College before earning his B.E.S. in Industrial Engineering and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Johns Hopkins University.
He is survived by the children from his 65-year marriage to Elaine Wolf: Andrew (Roni) Wolfe, Bonnie (Ted) Bloom, Stephanie Wolfe and Shoshanah (Brian) Drake; grandchildren Kira, Molly, Trevor, Sarah and Paige; and sister-in-law Gail Wolfe.
Memorial gifts are suggested to the Harvey and Elaine Wolfe Rabbinic Chair Endowment at Temple David, 4415 Northern Pike, Monroeville, PA 15146, or to the Albert G. Holzman Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
— Marty Levine