People

Three INFORMS members – Stephen C. Graves of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ali H. Sayed of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jianjun Shi of the Georgia Institute of Technology – are among those elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 2018. The NAE elected 83 new members and 16 foreign members this year, bringing the total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262.

Graves, the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management Science and professor of engineering systems and mechanical engineering, Sloan School of Management, MIT, was cited for contributions to the modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems and supply chains.

Sayed, distinguished professor of electrical engineering, UCLA, was cited for contributions to the theory and applications of adaptive signal processing.

Shi, the Carolyn J. Stewart chair and professor, Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech, was cited for development of data fusion-based quality methods and their implementation in multistage manufacturing systems.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept.30.

Three academicians with ties to the operations research community – David Gale, Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd Stowell Shapley – were featured in a Feb. 10 column by Wall Street Journal columnist Jo Craven McGinty for their work on the “Stable Marriage Problem.” Wrote McGinty: “The stable marriage problem and its solution were laid out in a landmark paper in 1962 by David Gale and Lloyd S. Shapley, both American mathematicians and economists. It has since been used to match doctors with hospitals and students with schools. ... The logic of the stable marriage problem and its solution may be modest. But in 2012, Drs. [Alvin E.] Roth and Shapley shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for using it to find practical solutions to real-world problems.”

David Gale, who passed away in 2008, was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. An INFORMS Fellow, he was a 1980 recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize.

Alvin Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford University, where he received both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in operations research.

Lloyd Stowell Shapley, who passed away in 2016, was a mathematician, an emeritus professor at UCLA and one of the founders of game theory. He was also an INFORMS Fellow and a recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize (1981).