Laura Albert elected president-elect of INFORMS

INFORMS announced that Laura Albert, the David H. Gustafson Department Chair of Industrial & Systems Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been elected president-elect and will serve as INFORMS president in 2023.

Albert served as INFORMS vice president of Marketing, Communications and Outreach from 2016-2019. She has also served as the president of the Women in OR/MS Forum (WORMS) and INFORMS Section on Public Sector Operations Research. She is a member of the INFORMS Strategic Planning Committee, Finance Committee and IT Committee. Albert was awarded the INFORMS Impact Prize in 2018 and the INFORMS Moving Spirit Award prior to that.

Albert routinely promotes operations research, industrial engineering and analytics through her outreach, giving public talks and media interviews. She also maintains the popular blog “Punk Rock Operations Research.”

Albert’s research applies operations research (O.R.) methodologies to important societal applications. Her primary methodological base is discrete optimization, including integer programming and Markov decision processes. She has applied O.R. methodologies to address public sector problems related to emergency medical services, homeland security, critical infrastructure protection, public safety and disaster response.