Women, Math, and Most Creative in Business

Fast Company has announced its 100 most creative people in business and Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, who is well-known in the INFORMS community, is on the list. Dr. Dietrich opened up our Fall 2007 Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science and we had the pleasure of hosting her during her visit to the Isenberg School of Management. She was hosted by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Her talk was on service science and she came to Amherst with one of her daughters. It is fantastic that a female in mathematical sciences who has also achieved the ranking of IBM Fellow is now recognized for her creativity and leadership by Fast Company. She is number 27 on the list and Sheila Bair, Chair of the FDIC, who had an office two doors down from me at the Isenberg School before she left to head the FDIC, is number 26. Those of you who know Dr. Dietrich probably know that she is also an amazing knitter -- so, of course, when she was in Amherst she visited WEBS, Americas' yarn store, which is located in Northampton, and which was founded by a former colleague of mine, Professor Art Elkins, and his wife.

Nice to see that the business community continues to recognize the importance of analytics in the optimization of business processes and in the delivery of services. It is especially nice to have a female operations researcher so recognized! Congratulations to Dr. Dietrich and to IBM! Congrats also to Sheila Bair, who is a lawyer, with superb analytical skills!