Augustine O. Esogbue serves as Professor Emeritus at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.  Professor Esogbue received his B.S. degree (Electrical Engineering U.C. Berkeley Option, with Minor in Mathematics) from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1964; M.S. (Industrial Engineering and Operations Research) from Columbia University, New York in 1965, and the Ph. D. (Engineering- Industrial Engineering in Operations Research and Control Theory) from the University of Southern California in 1968 where he had the distinction of being the first Ph. D graduate of world renowned academician, Professor Richard Bellman, becoming in the process, the first black Ph. D. in IE/OR in the world.  He did additional studies at University of California, Berkeley, and earned a postdoctoral certificate in Dynamics of Health Systems Modeling from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge in 1974.  

Professor Esogbue accepted his first academic appointment as Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Member of the Systems Research Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio – the first academic program in Operations Research in the world. Prior to joining Case Western, he coauthored, with Warren A. Hall and William S. Butcher, an article in Water Resources Research, describing his pioneering work applying Dynamic Programming to reservoir management for real time water and hydropower control for a network of reservoirs in California’s Central Valley district. It was historic in many ways. First, it was the first reported invocation of the Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition algorithm, in a large scale real world environment, to thwart the well known limitation of the “curse of dimensionality of dynamic programming”. Second, the efficiency of the algorithm allowed for its use on a real time setting at the location of reservoirs on different streams, paving the way for daily, weekly, and hourly release schedules and programming. These were multipurpose reservoirs with significant socio-technical implications. 

At Case Western, he pioneered the creative application of novel Operations Research and Management Science including fuzzy logic and fuzzy dynamic programming to resource allocation programming and challenging societal systems problems such as education, water resources management, and the healthcare industry with focus on studies of critical shortages in physician manpower and anesthesia administration as well as computational fuzzy dynamic programming algorithm applications to cancer research appropriation process. This and other unique contributions to scientific analysis of societal systems were acknowledged in the award of Fellow status, as early as January 1972, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In June 1972, Dr. Esogbue joined the Faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) as an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering under a joint appointment with the Health Systems Research Center.  In June 1977, he was promoted to the rank of a full Professor, with tenure, in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech becoming the first African to attain this rank in a major research university in the U.S. as well as the first BLACK full Professor in Georgia Tech’s history. His H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering has been ranked consistently the # 1 Graduate Program of its kind in the U.S. for the past 34 years by U. S. News and World Report Magazine.  Professor Esogbue, retired from Georgia Tech in December 2010 as the longest serving Full tenured Professor in his School. He is a pioneer of several impactful programs that resulted in significant transformative changes for the Institute, profession, and society at large.

 Professor Esogbue’s research breakthroughs, especially his contributions to reduction of dimensionality in computational dynamic programming in hitherto untouched areas such as nonserial dynamic programming continued thereby expanding the reach of the methodology to novel problem areas including dynamic programming and networks. Adroit linkage with new theories and vistas of knowledge in control and artificial intelligence, leading to breakthroughs in computational intelligence, became of great appeal and compelling.  Consequently, as far back as 1980,  Professor Esogbue became the Founder and Pioneer Director, Intelligent Systems and Controls Laboratory at Georgia Tech that creatively and effectively pioneered the hybridization of novel and potent reinforcement learning algorithms, dynamic programming, and adaptive online control to produce some of the first generations of intelligent controllers of interest to several agencies such as The National Science Foundation, NASA, Electric Power Research Institute, Patient Safety Agencies and advocates, Water Resource Agencies, Manufacturing, etc. For his acknowledged global expertise and leadership in these disciplines, Professor Esogbue was selected and appointed in 2003 by the U.S. Congress to the newly Reconstituted Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) of NASA, at a most critical point in that Agency’s history. And for his distinguished service to ASAP and outstanding contributions to US space mission, “leadership, dedication, and commitment to NASA which will benefit the Nation for generations to come”, he was presented the NASA Public Service Medal in 2006. Additionally, he won the prestigious Space Flight Awareness Team Award for the year 2006. 

Professor Esogbue has contributed immensely to industrial engineering, engineering and mathematical sciences and their applications.  Professor Esogbue is a 1972 elected Fellow of AAAS, a 2000 Fellow of IEEE, and a 2004 Fellow of INFORMS, to name a few. He is recognized today, world-wide, as one of the leading contributors to the vast research literature in dynamic programming, fuzzy logic and intelligent control, and the applications of operations research and management sciences (OR/SA) methodologies to scheduling and manufacturing, water resources and pollution, healthcare, and problems of developing economies.