2026 Edelman Gala Celebrates Excellence

The 2026 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference was held on April 12-14 in National Harbor, Maryland. There, the annual Edelman Gala showcased the best of the best in analytics. The full video of the 2026 Edelman Gala and award ceremony can be viewed on the INFORMS YouTube channel. The following award-winners were announced at this year’s gala.

2026 Franz Edelman Award

NFORMS awarded Microsoft the 2026 Franz Edelman Award for reengineering how global cloud infrastructure is planned and delivered by applying advanced analytics and AI to orchestrate complex fulfillment decisions across its expanding data center network. Microsoft’s LLM-powered assistant, based on the pioneering OptiGuide framework, democratizes decision intelligence with real-time explainability and scenario exploration, reducing fulfillment team workload by 23% and accelerating decision-making from days to minutes.

2026 INFORMS Prize

Microsoft was recognized with the 2026 INFORMS Prize for Excellence in Operations Research and Analytics for the company’s use of advanced analytics and O.R. to optimize its end-to-end cloud infrastructure and capacity management. The company’s engineering, supply chain, and research teams play a critical role in optimizing its global cloud ecosystem, from real-time virtual machine allocation to hardware fulfillment and data center deployment, enabling improvements in capacity utilization, cost efficiency, speed, and sustainability.

2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize

INFORMS awarded the 2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize – which recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of O.R. and analytics – to the Georgia Institute of Technology for its Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) program. Launched in 2014, the MSA spans operations research, machine learning, statistics, and applied business decision-making in a single, integrated degree. The program now graduates more than 1,000 students annually, and with more than 7,000 alumni since its inception, it is believed to be the largest analytics or data science degree program in the U.S.

2025 Wagner Prize

A team of researchers from George Washington University and the Meituan Group won the 2025 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research for their paper, “Rebalancing and Pricing of Near-Expiry Inventory in Online Grocery Retail.” The paper describes how the prize recipients developed and deployed a system for managing nearly expired grocery store food by coordinating night-time and dynamic pricing across thousands of micro-fulfillment centers, reducing spoilage by 20% and improving profitability.

2026 Early Career Practitioner Award

INFORMS awarded its Early Career Practitioner Award to Athanasios (Thanos) Lolos, principal data scientist at Navy Federal Credit Union, for his outstanding contributions in applying operations research and advanced analytics to real-world financial challenges. In just a few years, Lolos has helped transform how the world’s largest credit union, which serves more than 14 million members, uses data-driven insights to guide enterprise decision-making, improve financial forecasting, and strengthen member engagement.

2026 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA)

A research team from the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore won the 2026 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award for its work with the City of Toronto. The team developed and implemented a suite of analytics tools for urban bike infrastructure planning in the city, which they used to identify optimal locations for new bike lanes. The Toronto City Council has approved 29 km of bike lanes recommended by the team for construction, with an additional 27.6 km under study for future implementation.