Congrats to Newly Elected NAE Members (with a Great Group of INFORMS Members)!

Congratulations to the 2011 newly inducted Members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE)!

This group includes several very well-known INFORMS members, and I must say it is a very successful and deserving group -- John Birge of the University of Chicago, Amedeo Odoni of MIT, William Cook of Georgia Tech, Chris Hendrickson of CMU, and Christos Floudas of Princeton (who may not be an INFORMS member but is renowned in global optimization). Interestingly, both Odoni and Hendrickson work in transportation.

Congratulations to all, and if I missed someone from our professional society, I apologize.

John Birge spoke in our Speaker Series at UMass Amherst a few semesters ago and was terrific. The last time I saw him was at the Measuring System Risk conference that took place in Chicago, December 15-16, 2010.

As for Amedeo Odoni, he was a dear friend of my dissertation advisor at Brown, Stella Dafermos, and together we wrote a tribute to her in Transportation Science. He was also the recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science in 2001.

Time to celebrate!

The full list of newly elected members is here.