Porteus is the Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Management Science, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business. A graduate of Claremont Men’s College and Case Institute of Technology, he has also worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis) and at RAND Corporation, and was a Fulbright-Hays Senior Research Fellow from 1976 to 1977 in Australia. Porteus has published one book and over 50 articles and book chapters. He has been an associate editor of Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.

He has taught in both the MBA and PhD programs and has been an active PhD dissertation advisor. His teaching currently focuses on critical analytical thinking. He has served as codirector of the Stanford-NUS Executive Program in International Management and as area coordinator of the operations, information, and technology group. He was a founding codirector of the Product Development and Manufacturing Strategy Executive Program, a joint venture of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford School of Engineering. He was a founding board member of StartUp, now Renaissance Mid-Peninsula, a nonprofit located in East Palo Alto aimed at identifying, training, and empowering entrepreneurs with under-resourced backgrounds. He served four years as director of the Stanford GSB PhD Program.