Dave Gustafson, a pioneer in applying technology to human-centered health systems and a longtime professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died March 3, 2026. He was 85 years old.
A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Gustafson began his prolific six-decade career at UW-Madison in 1966 as a newly minted PhD graduate from the University of Michigan. When he started, the College of Engineering didn’t even have an industrial engineering department; he helped form what’s now the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) with a handful of faculty members from the mechanical engineering department.
Gustafson’s influential research focused on healthcare systems engineering, establishing UW-Madison as a national leader in the field. Over the course of his career, he worked on early computer systems for mental health crises, predictive analytics for quality of care, computer programs to support teen health, computer and mobile applications for breast and lung cancer patients, technology tools to support eldercare, and more.
In the late 1980s, he founded the Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies (CHESS) to support this work. With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (now the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), Gustafson and his team created the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System, a computer system they initially used to support patients with HIV or AIDS. The system became a template for future tools to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease, to promote healthy aging, to improve stress management, to help adolescents manage asthma, and to provide a suite of resources to patients leaving treatment for alcohol use disorder.
In the early 2000s, CHESS expanded into systematically improving addiction treatment and continues to develop new technologies and methods to improve the behavioral healthcare field. The center regularly earns multimillion dollar grants for its process improvement leadership from the federal government. In retirement, Gustafson was an exceptionally active emeritus faculty member, working on CHESS projects that included developing a Wisconsin-specific COVID-19 information app in early 2020.
“I was privileged to be part of groups of people who made an enormous difference in healthcare,” Gustafson said during a 2020 interview.
When the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering received alumni gifts to endow its chair position in 2020, Gustafson was the natural choice for a namesake. As then-department-chair Jeffrey Linderoth said at the time, “The primary person who put us on the map for health systems research—I don’t think it’s overstating—was Dave Gustafson.”
Gustafson is survived by his wife, Rea, their daughters Lori and Shelley, and their son Dave Jr., a longtime CHESS staff member and current web operations manager for Wisconsin Public Radio.
For more information, including plans for a celebration of life, read Gustafson’s full obituary.