Kathryn Elizabeth Stecke is an American industrial engineer and management scientist known for her expertise in flexible manufacturing, supply chains, and seru, a Japanese production system based on using small groups of workers to assemble whole products instead of using assembly lines in which each worker handles only a small and repetitive sub-assembly task.
She is a professor of operations management in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she holds the Naveen Jindal School Advisory Council Chair.
Stecke earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Boston State College in 1972.
She moved to the University of Texas at Dallas in 2002, and was Ashbel Smith Professor of Operations Management at the University of Texas at Dallas from 2006 until 2018, when she was given the Naveen Jindal School Advisory Council Chair.
She was elected to the 2009 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.