In Memory of Distinguished Professor R. Kevin Wood: 1955–2025

Roger Kevin Wood was born in 1955 in Oklahoma, but grew up on the American West Coast, attending the University of Portland from which he received undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. He earned an MS from Columbia University and, after three years at Bell Labs, he returned to the west coast for his PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley under the auspices of Professor Richard Barlow. His dissertation focused on network reliability (Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive 1988). He then joined the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, progressing through the ranks from assistant to distinguished emeritus professor. There, he energetically taught his signature course in Network Models, notorious among the students for its delayed gratification effect.

Professor Wood was an expert in stochastic programming (Mak et al. 1999), a pioneer in network interdiction (Wood 1993, Washburn and Wood 1995, Israeli and Wood 2002, Royset and Wood 2007), and also well known for combining these two disciplines (Cormican et al. 1998), garnering a significant amount of basic research funding from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He spent time at National Security Agency in the Washington, DC area, and enjoyed overseas experiences both in New Zealand (where he collaborated on several papers in capacity planning that have had practical implications, e.g., Singh et al. (2009)) and in Germany.

In addition to his highly theoretical and fundamental advancements in these fields, he contributed meaningfully to practice. His most popular paper (more than 1,100 citations at the time of this writing) is “Defending Critical Infrastructure,” a tutorial that appeared in Interfaces in 2006. In this paper, he and his coauthors show how bi- and trilevel optimization models can fortify infrastructure against terrorist attacks. Examples in the United States are drawn from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and from the Border Patrol. Another tutorial appearing in Interfaces with a major impact is “Optimization and Persistence,” which demonstrates how to minimize deviations from “first-solve” integer-programming solutions in the presence of a data change requiring a resolve; this modeling paradigm has practical significance for replanning in the face of uncertainty where data are revealed on a rolling-horizon basis.

Professor Wood was instrumental in the implementation of two case studies, in both military and civilian settings: “An Optimization Model for Modernizing the Army’s Helicopter Fleet,” and “The Kellogg Company Optimizes Production, Inventory, and Distribution,” published in Interfaces in 1991 and 2001, respectively. In the former case, the Army’s helicopter fleet was modernized while respecting constraints on fleet age, mix of aircraft type, and budgets over multiple years; the optimization model was then applied to other military fleet types. In the latter case, changes in operational policies reduced costs by approximately $4.5M in one year alone, with longer-term consolidation efforts projected to save tens of millions of dollars per year.

A practitioner in real life as well, Kevin will be remembered for his common-sense advice: “Always pack the power cord first!” He loved the outdoors, often engaging simultaneously in myriad seemingly incongruent activities: mushroom gathering, bird watching, and running. He was an avid supporter of whale conservation, an enophile, and an accomplished gourmet chef. He had long played the ukulele and guitar in preparation for Phase II: his notoriously difficult banjo. An excellent technical writer (in English) and fluent in Swedish, Kevin was a connoisseur of language, often invoking the audio feature on his computer to sound out a word or two–sometimes thereby startling his colleagues. He is survived by his two brothers, Tracy K. Wood and N. Carter Wood; a cousin, Susan Marie Warrner; and, his partner, Dr. Marianne Constable, a professor of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley.