Recognizing and Celebrating Outstanding Female Operations Researchers and Analytics Professionals

There are truly amazing female academicians and professionals in our field.

At the 2014 INFORMS conference, which finished yesterday, we had the opportunity to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of several amazing women.

In recognizing and celebrating them, we provide support also to younger generations, in the form of wonderful role models.

This past Tuesday morning, I had the pleasure of attending the Fora/Chapters breakfast at which the Moving Spirit Award was given as well as the Judith B. Liebman Award.  The Liebman award was given out to great student leaders:  Michelle McGaha Alvarado and Kimia Ghobadi, and Ruixie Guo. The Moving Spirit Award was given to Dr. Laura McLay of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Laura is a superwoman and she was recognized for her contributions as an officer of WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences), having also served as this forum's President. Laura has promoted the activities of this forum and both women and men through innovative activities, blogging, and social media.  She has worked tirelessly in nominating women for awards, while also being a top educator, mother of 3, and even runner and knitter! As has been said multiple times, Laura is also a great ambassador for Operations Research.

I was so happy to see her on the podium and then we could not resist taking a joint photo. Laura is holding her award plaque.

Later that day, at the WORMS (Women in Operations Research and the Management Sciences) lunch, the 2014 WORMS Award recipient was announced - Professor Aleda Roth of Clemson University. Professor Kathryn Stecke of UTDallas, last year's award recipient, was the chair of this committee. Aleda has already achieved Fellow status of several professional organizations and is especially known for her empirical work in Operations Management. The list (with photos) of WORMS Award winners can be viewed here.

One of my former students, Professor June Dong, took the below photo of Professor Roth and me:

The WORMS lunch was sold out and the below photo was shared with me by Professor Christian Wernz of VT. Thanks to Professor Susan Martonosi of Harvey Mudd College, who is the President of WORMS, for being such a great emcee of this event!

On Monday, we recognized and celebrated the 2014 elected INFORMS Fellows. Only .015% of the over 11,000 INFORMS members are Fellows and the full list is here.

This year, 2 out of the 12 new Fellows are females: Dr. Candi Yano of UC Berkeley, who was the organizer of the INFORMS San Francisco conference, and Dr. Radhika Kulkarni of SAS.

I took the photo of Drs. Yano and Kulkarni below.

I have written about Dr. Kulkarni on this blog. One of my former PhD students, Dr. Padma Ramanujam, works for SAS and I have visited SAS in Cary, NC.

Below are photos of the desserts at our INFORMS Fellows lunch table as well as of my great companions at the lunch. Professor Panos Pardalos and I "hosted" several student award winners.

Congrats to all the remarkable women!