2019 INFORMS Awards Ceremony
By Amira Hijazi
“It has been quite a night to remember!” quoting Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, the recipient of the Informs President’s Award and the John von Neumann Theory Prize along with Dr. Jong-Shi Pang, at the awards ceremony last night. Prof Bertsimas’s research is sustained, multidimensional, and highly impactful. On behalf of all of us in the optimization and operation management society, we thank him for his great contributions to the field and for his motivational words at the awards ceremony where he quoted Steve Jobs as saying “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
Love what you do! That was the defining characteristic of all awards recipients: starting with the recipient of the Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services, David Mildebrath, and the recipient of the Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military Applications, Nicholas Shallcross.
The George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition recognizes outstanding papers in the field of operations research and management science. Papers are evaluated based on their novelty, originality impact, and breadth. Five students were finalists: Yilun Chen won first place, Jessica Hoffmann won second place, and three received honorable mention—Mine Su Erturk, Ruoxuan Xiong, and Ruihoao Zhu.
Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition first place went to Somya Singhvi. Weijia Jing, Keziban Tasci, and Shixiang Zhu won second place and Hamoud Alsabah was honorable mention.
The best dissertation award, George B. Dantzig Award, went to Sebastien Martin from MIT.
Informs doesn’t only honor grad students but also undergraduate students have the opportunity to win Undergraduate Operations Research Prize if they conduct a significant applied project in operations research or management science. This year, the winner of the award was Milan Preet Kaur from the University of Waterloo.
What happens after you finish graduate school? You continue doing what you love either by creation dissemination and classroom use of new unpublished cases in OR and INFORMS will honor you by receiving the INFORMS Case Competition prize. The recipient of the award this year is Saurabh Bansal from Penn State University! Another way of doing what you love is by helping your students to succeed like Dr. Patrick Noonan from Emory University who received the Prize for the Teaching of the OR/MS Practice.
The Saul Gass Expository Writing Award honors an operations research or management scientist whose publications demonstrate a high standard of expository writing. This year’s recipient is Dr. Sunil Chopra from Northwestern University. This is not the only award that honors best contribution papers. The Fredrick W. Lanchester Prize is also awarded for the best contribution to operations research and management science published in the past five years. The five winners of the award are Tim Roguhgarden and Yonatan Gur from Stanford University, Omar Bebes and Assaf Zeevi from Columbia University, and N. Bora Keskin from Duke University.
Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award winner this year is Dr. Peter Glynn from Stanford University. Finally, giving to the community always pays off! Dr. Edward Kaplan and Dr. Peter C. Bell received the George E. Kimball Medal for recognition of their distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession of operations research and management science.
Congratulations to all of the awardees! Keep up the great work!