Celebrating outstanding member accomplishments with prestigious awards

Editor’s Note: For more information, visit the Awards Hall here. Presentations are available to Annual Meeting registrants until Jan. 31, 2022. The full Awards Ceremony can be viewed on the INFORMS YouTube channel [1].

INFORMS President’s Award

INFORMS 2021 President Steve Graves presented this year’s President’s Award to Brenda Dietrich in recognition of her outstanding contributions in research and leadership at IBM, and for her service to INFORMS and the operations research (O.R.) and analytics community at large.

Dietrich (right) earned her Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University and joined IBM Research in 1984. At IBM, she developed and deployed O.R. models and algorithms, both throughout IBM businesses and for IBM clients, with great impact. Her research has resulted in more than three dozen patents or pending patents, as well as a comparable number of journal publications. These efforts contributed to IBM being awarded an Edelman Award, several Wagner Prizes and the INFORMS Prize. Starting in 2001, Dietrich led the Mathematical Sciences function in the IBM Research division for over a decade. In this role, she directed the research of 90 scientists working in areas such as optimization, statistics, data mining, operations research and dynamical systems. Activities included basic research, as well as the development of leading edge applications for internal use and for clients. She was named an IBM Fellow in 2007, the company’s pre-eminent technical distinction, granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership. In 2008 she was appointed IBM vice president and subsequently became the chief technology officer and strategist for IBM’s Business Analytics group.

After 33 years at IBM, Dietrich returned to Cornell University in 2017 as the Arthur and Helen Geoffrion Professor of Practice in the School of Operations Research to work with students in teaching and research.

Throughout her career, Dietrich has provided extraordinary service to INFORMS, serving on the INFORMS Board as vice president for Practice, and as president of INFORMS. She was a founding member of the Forum for Women in Operations Research and Management Science (WORMS) and chaired the advisory committee for the first two INFORMS Practice Conferences (now the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference).

Dietrich has won numerous prestigious awards. She is an INFORMS Fellow and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. She has been awarded the INFORMS Kimball Medal for her service contributions, INFORMS Impact Prize for being a founding member of COIN-OR, and the Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS.

In her acceptance speech, Dietrich said, “First, and most importantly, operations research saved me from becoming a chalk-covered math professor focused on obscure theory with no known application. When I first encountered the field as a math Ph.D. student at Cornell, I knew I had found a home.” She concluded, “I am truly appreciative of this award, and all that INFORMS does. I hope to continue my association with INFORMS and the profession of operations research for many more years.”  

George E. Kimball Medal

Cynthia Barnhart and Michael Gorman received the Kimball Medal, which recognizes distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession of operations research and the management sciences. Larry Wein served as the 2021 committee chair.

Cynthia Barnhart is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT, with appointments in the Sloan School of Management and School of Engineering. She served as the sixth chancellor of MIT during 2014-2021, the first woman to hold this position. During her MIT career, she was also associate and acting dean of the School of Engineering and co-directed both the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Barnhart has developed models, optimization methods and decision support systems for large-scale transportation problems, which has influenced the practice of integrated airline scheduling. She is an INFORMS Fellow and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. She received a second-place Edelman Award, as well as honorary doctorates from École Polytechnique and the University of Toronto.

Barnhart has provided illustrious service to the INFORMS community since joining ORSA 35 years ago. She served as president of INFORMS in 2008 and spearheaded the establishment of the Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition, which helped increase awareness and participation in research and activities focused on societal impact within the INFORMS community. She served as president of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society and the forum for Women in OR/MS (WORMS). She received the WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS, which recognizes her commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. She received the 2020 INFORMS President’s Award from Pinar Keskinocak. Barnhart has also served on the editorial boards of numerous INFORMS journals.

Michael Gorman is the Niehaus Endowed Chair in Operations and Analytics in the School of Business at the University of Dayton. Through numerous publications, Gorman has strongly contributed to the practice of operations research and analytics, and has several times been a finalist or semi-finalist for the Edelman Award and the Wagner Prize. He has also been awarded the INFORMS Volunteer Service Award and INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice.

For nearly 30 years, Gorman has provided consistent high-impact service to INFORMS and the O.R. profession. He was instrumental in launching the INFORMS Analytics Section, which is now the largest society in INFORMS. He was its inaugural chair and led the recruitment of its first 500 members. In the section’s first year, he conceived, implemented and chaired the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA), which is still the central award of the Society. As a result of his leadership and distinguished service, in 2020 the society named its distinguished service award the Michael F. Gorman Award for Distinguished Contributions to the INFORMS Analytics Society. He has also been very active in the INFORMS Rail Applications Section, and was its chair in 1997-1998 and 2009-2010.

As editor-in-chief for the last four years, Gorman led the journal name change from Interfaces to INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, and also spearheaded its 50th anniversary special issue. He was the first contributing editor of Management Science charged with “Management Insights,” to summarize and translate articles into a form managers can understand and appreciate. He wrote about a thousand practitioner-centric abstracts covering every paper published in Management Science from 2010-2016.

Frederick W. Lanchester Prize

The 2021 Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and management science published in English was awarded to Dimitris Bertsimas and Jack Dunn, both from MIT, for their book, “Machine learning under a modern optimization lens.”

The book develops machine learning using discrete, robust and convex optimization techniques. It takes a rigorous, optimization-based approach to machine learning that improves the out-of-sample performance and facilitates the analysis of large-scale instances of central machine learning problems. It demonstrates the value from viewing machine learning problems through an optimization lens for a diverse set of applications.

John von Neumann Theory Prize

The 2021 John von Neumann Theory Prize was awarded to Alex Shapiro of Georgia Tech for his foundational contributions to theory and computational methods for stochastic programming, as well as seminal contributions to nonlinear analysis. According to the prize citation, the outstanding breadth and depth of Shapiro’s research, combined with his contributions to the mathematical optimization community, make him an outstanding recipient of this prestigious prize.

Shapiro has had a formative impact on stochastic programming, with many influential papers on the topic and two highly-cited books on the subject (one joint with A. Ruszczynski, “Stochastic Programming,” Elsevier, 2003, and the other joint with D. Dentcheva and A. Ruszczynski, “Lectures on Stochastic Programming,” SIAM, 2009, 2014). His pioneering contribution to the complexity analysis of stochastic programming, which builds upon his development (since the 1980s) of a large and very influential body of work related to the asymptotic analysis and statistical inference of sample average approximations (SAA) of stochastic programs. His paper, “Simulation-based optimization: Convergence analysis and statistical inference,” published in Stochastic Models in 1996, investigates, for the first time in the then 40-year-old history of the subject, theoretical computational complexity of various generic stochastic programming problems.

His recent work focuses on risk-averse decision-making and includes development of a new modeling methodology for multistage risk-averse decision-making, reducing the problem to a “nested” series of similar problems with smaller time horizons (and thus much more “computationally friendly” than the original multistage formulation of the problem). The techniques for multistage risk-averse decision-making developed by Shapiro form the core methodology underlying Brazil’s long-term planning of electric power generation.

Shapiro is also well known for his contributions to sensitivity analysis and optimality conditions in continuous optimization, having developed important results for conic, nonsmooth and semi-infinite problems, problems involving matrix-valued functions and functions of eigenvalues of symmetric matrices, variational inequalities, and problems with equilibrium constraints. 

Philip McCord Morse Lectureship

The Lectureship is awarded in odd-numbered years in honor of Philip McCord Morse in recognition of his pioneer contribution to the field of operations research and the management sciences.

This year’s lectureship was awarded to Alvin E. Roth of Stanford University, who exemplifies the true spirit of Professor Morse and who, like Morse, has been an outstanding spokesperson for the operations research profession in O.R. tools and ideas in designing efficient markets for a range of applications.

Daniel H. Wagner Prize

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California won the 2021 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research for their work to deploy a national-scale targeted testing system to allocate limited testing resources in Greece to screen visitors for COVID-19 at the border. The prize-winning team included Hamsa Sridhar Bastani of the Wharton School and Kimon Drakopoulos and Vishal Gupta, both of the USC Marshall School of Business. 

The prize-winning paper, “Interpretable O.R. for High-stakes Decisions: Designing the Greek COVID-19 Testing System,” provides profound applications of analytics and O.R. to effectively allocate resources to enact a testing system to ensure the health and safety of people who visit and live in Greece. The researchers developed the system to be used at the border for those entering the country.

Other finalists included:

• “Data-driven Optimization for Atlanta Police Zone Design,” Shixiang Zhu, He Wang, Yao Xie, Georgia Institute of Technology
• “Solving the Ride-sharing Productivity Paradox: Priority Dispatch and Optimal Priority Sets,” Garrett J. van Ryzin, Amazon Corporate LLC
• “Increasing Chip Availability Through a New After-Sales Service Supply Concept at ASML,” Douniel Lamghari-Idrissi, ASML and Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, Rob Basten and Geert-Jan van Houtum, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
• “Collaborating with Local and Federal Law Enforcement for Disrupting Sex Trafficking Networks,” Nickolas K. Freeman, Burcu B. Keskin, Gregory J. Bott, University of Alabama

Volunteer Service Awards

Recipients of this year’s Volunteer Service Awards include: Canan G. Corlu, Boston University; Kara M. Morgan, Carnegie Mellon University; Jorge Samayoa, Galileo University; Norm Reitter, CANA Advisors. First awarded in 2016, the awards are given to INFORMS members to recognize exceptional volunteer service to the Institute.

Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Fellowship

New this year, the Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Fellowships provided the opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to attend the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting, either virtually or in Anaheim. This fellowship program, sponsored by Amazon SCOT, aims to foster the professional pipeline of operations research, management science and analytics researchers by providing undergraduate juniors and seniors, as well as graduate students from underrepresented groups, an opportunity to experience these exciting fields and gain professional development opportunities by attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting. Fellowships covered conference registration fees. For those attending in-person, the fellowship also provided hotel accommodations.

The inaugural recipients of the Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Fellowships included:

• Oscar Aguilar, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Omogbolade Ajayi, Alabama A&M University
• Margaret Ajuwon, Morgan State University
• Morgan Brown, Spelman College & Georgia Institute of Technology
• Marie Pelagie Elimbi Moudio, University of California, Berkeley
• Opeyemi Fadipe, Morgan State University
• Mariana Hermosillo Hidalgo, The University of Texas at El Paso
• Valeria Laynes Fiascunari, University of Central Florida
• Isaiah Levy, University of Central Florida
• Ebony Liddell, University of Central Florida
• Carlos A. Morel-Figueroa, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez
• Karen Munoz, The University of Texas at El Paso
• Joaquin Nieves, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez
• Carlos Olivos, Auburn University
• Eliana Marcela Pena Tibaduiza, Auburn University
• Daniel II Ramos Ojeda, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez
• Stephanie Santiago-Montano, Auburn University
• Francisco Valdez, University of Central Florida
• Dajon Wiafe, Morgan State University
• Karolay Yepes, University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez
• Tsegai Yhdego, Florida A&M University

Saul Gass Expository Writing Award

Michael Fu of the University of Maryland received the 2021 Saul Gass Expository Writing Award, which recognizes an author whose publications set an exemplary standard of exposition. The writing should possess an influence and accessibility enhanced by expository excellence.

Professor Fu (right) is a very creative researcher who has extensively written for the INFORMS community during the last three decades. His 200+ writings primarily address the role of simulation in optimization methods. Building on his stellar research output, which has been recognized by five best paper or outstanding publication awards, Fu has written numerous highly impactful expository tutorials.

For example, his 2002 INFORMS Journal on Computing article titled “Optimization for simulation: Theory vs. practice” provided the foundation for bringing together the two communities of optimization and simulation. It also addressed the question of connecting research to practice, specifically software. Due in no small part to Fu’s insights, every simulation software package today incorporates simulation optimization into their platform.

Fu notes, “For me, service is something that comes naturally when the cause is something you believe in. And I am a true believer in humanizing and mainstreaming our discipline. I am also very fortunate to have the opportunities that INFORMS and some of its key members have presented me.”

Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice

Jill Hardin Wilson (left) of Northwestern University won the 2021 Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, which is awarded annually to a teacher for excellence in teaching the practice of OR/MS. The purpose of this award is to recognize a teacher who has succeeded in helping their students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective practitioners of operations research or management science.

The citation read in part: “Developing strong practitioners requires more than course variety, course materials and classroom presence. It requires actively engaging students with concepts, teaching them to think critically, and developing the professional skills that support the implementation of engineering solutions. Dr. Wilson excels in all these areas. Students use the knowledge gained from Dr. Wilson's teaching methods to be successful practitioners.”

INFORMS Case Competition

Georgina Hall, Piyush Gulati and Anton Ovchinnikov, all from INSEAD, won the 2021 INFORMS Case Competition for the project “Integration Planning at SFB.”

Second place was awarded to Melanie-Anne Atkins, Lauren Cipriano and Oladapo Folami from Western University, for their project “Pennsylvania Dominion.”

The INFORMS Case Competition encourages the creation, dissemination and classroom use of new, unpublished cases in operations research, management science and analytics. Submissions are judged according to the relevance of application of one or more of INFORMS constituent disciplines and on the quality of the presentation given during the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award

Somya Singhvi of MIT won the 2021 George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Improving Farmers’ and Consumers’ Welfare in Agricultural Supply Chains via Data-driven Analytics and Modeling: From Theory to Practice.” Second place was awarded to Dennis Shen, also of MIT, for his paper, “Causal Inference: A Tensor’s Perspective.” Named after a legendary OR/MS figure and the “Father of Linear Programming,” the award is given for the best dissertation in any area of OR/MS that is innovative and relevant to practice.

Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition

Lily Xu (right) of Harvard University won the 2021 Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition for her project, “Learning, Optimization, and Planning Under Uncertainty for Wildlife Conservation.” Omar Skali Lami of MIT placed second for his project, “The Power of Analytics in Epidemiology for COVID-19: Prediction, Prevalence, and Vaccine Allocation.”

This year, the prize committee received 13 submissions, and six finalists were invited to present in a special virtual session during the Annual Meeting. The competition honors outstanding student projects that have, or are likely to have, a significant societal impact on individuals, communities and organizations that go beyond that of private and for-profit initiatives. 

George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition

Shih Dong of Stanford University won the 2021 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition for the paper, “Efficient Reinforcement Learning in a Complex Environment.” The runner-up was Yatharth Dubey, Georgia Tech, for the paper, “Branch-and-Bound Solves Random Binary IPs in Polytime.”

This year the committee had to select a winner from 113 submissions.

The George Nicholson student award was established in memory of George E. Nicholson, Jr. The competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding student papers in the fields of operations research and the management sciences. The criteria used by the award committee include originality, technical depth and correctness, novelty, breadth and expected impact and exposition.

Undergraduate Operations Research Prize

The 2021 Undergraduate Operations Research Prize was presented to Jiyoon Lim of Georgia Tech for his work, “The Bicycle Network Improvement Problem: Optimization Algorithms and A Case Study in Atlanta.” Honorable mention went to David Troxell of Southern Methodist University.

The 2021 prize committee was chaired by Kayse Lee Maass, who accepted 23 high-quality entries from five countries. The entries either tackled challenging theory and methodology problems or solved impactful real-world problems with OR/MS techniques. 

Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award

Rahul Mazumder of MIT was named the second recipient of the Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award for Excellence in Operations Research. This award was established by a generous endowment from the Donald P. Gaver family and its purpose is to support creative and diverse work in operations research in the early career of the recipient.

Mazumder was awarded for outstanding and widely recognized research contributions at the interface of operations research, statistics, machine learning and optimization and their dissemination in software packages; for applying his research results to problems in industry and the government; and for mentoring Ph.D. students.

This award honors the legacy of longtime member and INFORMS Fellow Donald P. Gaver, Jr., who served as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 1989 and was highly respected among his peers as well as a mentor to students. The award candidate must be within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. and be in a tenure-track academic appointment.

2021 Seth Bonder Scholarships

The 2021 Bonder Scholarship for Applied O.R. in Health Services was awarded to Luke DeRoos, while the 2021 Bonder Scholarship for Applied O.R. in Military and Security Applications was won by Kyle J. Hunt.

DeRoos is pursuing a Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering under the guidance of Dr. Mariel Lavieri at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on improving the quality of, and access to, healthcare using methods including stochastic modeling, optimization and statistical methodologies. Specific applications include medical decision-making in chronic eye diseases and organ transplantation policy.

DeRoos is a Rackham Merit Fellow and serves as an officer of the INFORMS Student Chapter at the University of Michigan. He is passionate about social justice issues and is a member of the INFORMS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.

In his acceptance speech, DeRoos said, “What I love about people in INFORMS is that when we see a problem, we want to fix it. You all do more than make things – you make things better. And it is so inspiring to see the incredibly smart people in this organization work to improve virtually every aspect of our lives, and to try and make a difference in a very tangible way. I think the Bonder Foundation and the Health Applications Society really exemplify this ideal – to further the science of OR/MS while also having a practical impact on our world. This is what I hope to do with my research on managing and scheduling chronic disease treatment. I’m truly honored to have been selected for this award.”

Hunt is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and his primary research focus is in the areas of homeland/national security and humanitarian management. Nathaniel Bastien, chair of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military and Security Applications, noted that Hunt and his research best represent the successful application of process modeling and O.R. analyses to defense-related applications.

Seth Bonder was a U.S. Air Force pilot, professor at the University of Michigan, founder and CEO of Vector Research and an extraordinary leader in the field of operations research. He served as the 27th president of ORSA, a vice president of IFORS, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kimball Medal and the INFORMS President’s Award. Dr. Bonder established the scholarships to encourage O.R. approaches to the areas of military applications and health services. The scholarships aim to promote the development and use of process modeling and operations research analysis to military and healthcare applications.

Merrill Bonder, Seth’s widow and executive director of the Seth Bonder Foundation, continues to support these scholarships.

Reference

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sbI3J3jLk0