Esma Gel is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at ASU. Gel received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey in 1994. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1995 and 1999, respectively.

Gel came to the Fulton School in Spring of 2000. Since then she has been teaching graduate and undergraduate level courses in the area of Operations Research, specifically focusing on production systems control and supply chain management.

Her research focuses on the use of applied probability techniques for management and design of production systems and supply chains. Some of her recent work has been on workforce agility and management, queuing approximations for performance evaluation of manufacturing systems, and impact of data quality problems on inventory control systems. Gel has presented her work in national and international conferences, and published in several archival journals including Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Transactions, Decision Sciences. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as several (semiconductor) companies such as Intel, IBM and Infineon.

Gel is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the IIE, American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), and the Operations Research Society of Turkey.