Guggenheim Fellows Announced but Noone in OR / MS

The Guggenheim Foundation has announced the Guggenheim Fellows for 2010. There are 180 selected Fellows out of an applicant pool of 3,000. You may find the links to the press release and to the names of the recipients and their fields here. The ages of this year's Fellows range from 27 to 73, and some of the names you may recognize (or at least I did). Congratulations to them all! I wish them all the best as they pursue their fellowship projects. There is nothing like having uninterrupted time (with support) to engage in creative and scholarly activities.

I was disappointed, though, that I could not identify any Fellows this year who are in operations research or in closely allied disciplines. We have had Guggenheim Fellows in past years, including Professor Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois, who spoke in our Speaker Series on April 2, Professor Michael Ferris of the University of Wisconsin, and Professor Robert Fourer of Northwestern University. There may have been others over the years but these professional colleagues have been more recent recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships. As Professor Jacobson told me during his recent visit to UMass Amherst, in 2003, he was the only Guggenheim Fellow in Engineering (and his project was on aviation security). He also told me that all of his recommendation letter writers were former Guggenheim Fellows.

Fellows of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard should be announced soon, so, perhaps, there will be some representatives in that group from operations research and the management sciences (both Professor Elaine Chew of USC and I were Science Fellows at Radcliffe recently, but in different years -- I was in the class RI '06). By the way, three former Radcliffe Fellows are among this year's Guggenheim Fellows and they are: Caroline Elkins RI '04, Tandy Warnow RI '04, and Mary Lum RI '05.