STECKE, BIRGE RECEIVE KIMBALL MEDALS

Kathryn E. Stecke of the University of Texas and John R. Birge of the University of Chicago received 2008 George E. Kimball Medals for distinguished service to INFORMS and the O.R. profession. The medals were presented at the 2008 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Kathryn E. Stecke: The Ashbel Smith Professor of Operations Management in the School of Management of the University of Texas at Dallas, Stecke is internationally recognized for her research in flexible manufacturing. In February 2004, INFORMS selected 50 papers that “represented the most significant research published in Management Science in the last half century.” Her 1983 paper, “Formulation and Solution of Nonlinear Integer Production Planning Problems for Flexible Manufacturing Systems,”is on that select list. She is the founding editor in chief of the International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems and editor in chief of Operations Management Education Review.

Stecke joined both ORSA and TIMS early in graduate school and began society service as a member of the ORSA Student Affairs Committee and served as secretary/treasurer of the ORSA Computer Science Technical Section from 1983 through1984. She served as program chair of the INFORMS national meeting in Seattle in 1995, as plenary chair of the 2005 INFORMS meeting in San Francisco and as general chair of the International 2001 INFORMS Summer Conference in Maui.

Stecke served on the INFORMS Board from 1999-2001 and again as INFORMS’ vice president for Sections and Societies from 2003-2004. Last year, she was awarded the INFORMS 2007 Manufacturing and Services Operations Management Distinguished Service Award.

Also active in the Production and Operations Management Society, Stecke was general chair of POM-07 Dallas and has served on several other POM program committees. She served on the POMS Board of Directors (2006-2008) and is an associate editor of the Production and Operations Management journal.

John R. Birge: The Jerry W. and Carol Lee Levin Professor of Operations Management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Birge was formerly the was dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He also served as professor and chair of Industrial and Operations Engineering and chair and founder of the Financial Engineering Program at the University of Michigan.

Birge’s work considers the design and analysis of practical systems in which outcomes are not completely known before decisions must be made. He has developed computational methods for stochastic programming models of these systems, approximation procedures for representing values with defined error bounds, efficient procedures for exploiting special structure in specific problem instances, and analyses of the interdependence between operational and financial decisions in firms.

He has applied his research to decisions including optimal asset and liability allocations over time, efficient periodic scheduling of workers and machines, productive power and energy distribution, and effective allocation of public services. He has consulted for many companies on these applications in the manufacturing, transportation, energy, healthcare, education and financial sectors and is a cofounder and principal of Quantstar Corporation, a financial engineering and business analytics company.

Among his honors, Birge was selected as an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator, received the Medallion Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the INFORMS Fellows Award, the Best Paper Award from the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the 2008 Kuhn Prize from the Naval Research Logistics journal.

For INFORMS and its predecessor organizations, Birge has served as vice president of the Southeastern Michigan Chapter, chair of the Fora Subcommittee, chair of the Lanchester Prize Committee, chair of the Speakers Program, chair of the Association of Chairs of Operations Research Departments (ACORD), member of the Operations Research Editor Search and Practice Committees, vice president of Subdivisions and president of INFORMS. He is currently chair of the Optimization Society, and a member of the Subdivision Council, the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Editor Search Committee and the Nicholson Prize Committee.

Birge is particularly proud of his efforts to establish new communities, such as the Minority Issues Forum and Quality, Statistics and Reliability Section, and to broaden the reach of INFORMS to academics and practitioners outside of customary disciplinary boundaries.