We Celebrated the 2016 Inducted INFORMS Fellows @INFORMS2016

I hope that all 5,700+ who attended the INFORMS Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, have made it back safely to their destinations, although, some, I suspect, may still be traveling, given the global participation of operations researchers and analytics professionals at this conference.

I returned late last night to Amherst, Massachusetts, and today taught my Transportation and Logistics class. I  shared the conference program with my students. This is my second blogpost of the day since there is so much to report about this great conference.

On Monday, we celebrated the induction of the 2016 class of INFORMS Fellows. The first class of INFORMS Fellows was inducted in 2002. This year there were 2 females out of 12 elected, as in the years 2015 and 2014. In 2013, I was the only female elected an INFORMS Fellow and in 2012 there were no females elected. Nice to see that we are moving in a positive direction!

According to the INFORMS website: The Fellow Award is reserved for distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS). 

The 2016 Fellows were inducted at an Awards Lunch at our Annual Conference.

Prior to the lunch, I could not resist taking the photo below of Dr. Eva Lee of Georgia Tech, who is a 2015 INFORMS Fellow, seated with Dr. Ariela Sofer of George Mason University, who was inducted this year, as we waited for the doors to open.

I saw Ariela at the EURO conference in Poznan, Poland this past summer and we enjoyed the plenary of the Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, Robert Aumann, together. I heard Eva give a plenary talk the year before in a beautiful church at the EURO conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Let's just say, we, operations researchers, are definitely frequent fliers!

Attendance at the Fellows Lunch was extraordinary - the human operations research capital there was amazing and I do attest that the Fellows are also so nice and friendly. I was thrilled since one of my nominees got selected this year.

Before getting seated to lunch, I took several photos below.

In the above photos some of you may recognize Drs. Suvrajeet Sen, Mauricio Resende, Panos M. Pardalos, Suresh Sethi, Paolo Toth (a 2016 INFORMS Fellow), and Nimrod Meggido.

In the above photo is my academic sister, Dr. Georgia Perakis of MIT, who, along with Ariela Sofer, represented the females in the Fellows class of 2016. She is standing opposite her husband, Dr. Dimitri Bertsimas of MIT. Also in the photo are Fellows Dr. Dorit Hochbaum of UC Berkeley and Dr. David Shmoys of Cornell University.

Georgia and I had the same doctoral dissertation advisor at Brown University - Dr. Stella Dafermos, but she passed away before Georgia defended her dissertation, so Professor Tom Magnanti, formerly the Dean of Engineering at MIT, guided her until completion. I was Stella's 1st PhD student and Georgia was Stella's 4th.

 

Seated at my table were: Dr. David Simchi-Levi of MIT, Dr. Guillermo Gallego, now of HKUST in Hong Kong, Dr. Chris Tang of UCLA, Dr. Ramayya Krishnan, Dean of the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, Dr. Michael Katehakis of Rutgers University, and Dr. Mauricio Resende, now of Amazon.   The dessert was delicious - a bourbon, pecan chocolate tart with cream on top. Dr. Krishnan was one of my hosts when I gave a talk at Carnegie Mellon last April. Dr. Tang is the editor of the book series in which my Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective appears as the second volume. Dr. Pardalos and I, along with Dr. Ilias Kotsireas, co-edited the book: Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, which will be out very soon and which Springer had a prepublication volume on display at its booth.

I could not resist having the photos taken below of the books at the Exhibit Hall.

 The full list of 2016 INFORMS Fellows is below:


Congratulations to:
Stephen P. Boyd
Kevin Glazebrook
Peter J. Haas
Jeff Linderoth
Sanjay Mehrotra
George J. Miller
Georgia Perakis
Mauricio G.C. Resende
Ariela Sofer
Tamás Terlaky
Paolo Toth
Pascal Van Hentenryck!

It does amaze me that of the 12 new Fellows, I have corresponded with 7  recently.

Let's say we came back very inspired and energized from the INFORMS conference in Nashville!