Anita Vila
Director of Multidisciplinary Engineering Senior Design
- Email: arvila@ncsu.edu
Anita Vila is the Director of Multidisciplinary Engineering Senior Design and Professor of the Practice in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State. She returns to NC State after a decade leading product organizations at Amazon, McKesson and Gartner, bringing more than 20 years of product leadership in health technology and operations into the engineering classroom.
Most recently, as Head of Product for Pharmacy Services at Amazon, Vila led the clinical product portfolio responsible for prescription acquisition, pharmacist workflows and patient safety, significantly improving profitability through workflow optimization and AI enablement. She also founded The Product Lab, a health tech product consulting practice. Prior to Amazon, she was a Sr. Director at McKesson/Ontada responsible for the precision medicine, clinical trials, and clinical decision support products. She also advised VP- and C-level healthcare executives on supply chain transformation at Gartner and began her career as a New Product Operations Engineer, managing global laptop manufacturing launches at Dell.
Vila spent six years on the NC State ISE faculty earlier in her career, publishing 18 refereed articles on healthcare delivery optimization and serving as co-PI on Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) -funded research to improve patient outcomes through community pharmacy models.
In her new role, she is spearheading the development of a multidisciplinary senior design program in engineering. The program will launch in the fall of 2026 and incorporate industry-informed practices in discovery methodology, user-centered design, metrics, and high-velocity decision-making.
Education
| Degree | Program | School | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | Industrial Engineering | NC State University | 2010 |
| M.A. | Operations Management | Duke University | 2006 |
| M.S. | Industrial Engineering | Texas A&M | 2004 |
| B.S. | Industrial Engineering | NC State University | 2001 |
Awards and Honors
- 2016 | George Blessis Award, NC State University
- 2016 | C.A. Anderson Outstanding Teacher Award
- 2014-2016 | TH!NK Faculty Fellow
- 2014 | Outstanding Global Engagement Award Nominee
- 2012 | Outstanding New Advisor Certificate of Merit, National Academic Advising Association
- 2011 | New Faculty Advisor Award, NC State University
- 2011 | Mid-Atlantic Region Outstanding Chapter Advisor, Institute of Industrial Engineering
- 2011 | Interdisciplinary Liaison Award
Publications
- AC 2012-3821: Integrating project management, Lean-Six Sigma, and assessment in an industrial engineering capstone course
- Vila-Parrish, A., & Raubenheimer, D. (2015), 2015 ieee conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (cvpr).
- An exploratory study of global competencies considered by multinational companies: A hiring perspective
- Streiner, S. C., Vila-Parrish, A. R., & Warnick, G. M. (2015), International Journal of Engineering Education, 31(5), 1239–1254.
- Teaching to foster critical and creativing TH!NKing at North Carolina State University
- Vila-Parrish, A., Carson, S., Moore, D., Atkinson, M., Auten, A., & Queen, S. (2015), Proceedings of 2015 International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL), 1117–1119.
- Understanding the evolution of mathematics performance in primary education and the implications for STEM learning: A Markovian approach
- Reamer, A. C., Ivy, J. S., Vila-Parrish, A. R., & Young, R. E. (2014, October 29), Computers in Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.09.037
- A simulation-based approach for inventory modeling of perishable pharmaceuticals
- Vila-Parrish, A. R., Ivy, J. S., & King, R. E. (2008, December 1), 2008 Winter Simulation Conference, pp. 1532–1538. https://doi.org/10.1109/wsc.2008.4736234
