Welcome to the Awards Hall! Please check back each day to view the prizes and competitions occurring on that day.
INFORMS President’s Award
The purpose of the INFORMS President’s Award is to recognize, and thereby encourage, important contributions to the welfare of society by members of our profession at the local, national, or global level. The award is an engraved citation.
This year, the President’s Award is given to:
Anna B. Nagurney
University of Massachusetts Amherst
John von Neumann Theory Prize
The John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded annually to a scholar (or scholars in the case of joint work) who has made fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences. The prize is awarded for a body of work, typically published over a period of several years. Although recent work should not be excluded, the prize typically reflects contributions that have stood the test of time. The criteria for the prize are broad, and include significance, innovation, depth, and scientific excellence.
Learn more about the von Neumann Prize and how to be nominated in the INFORMS website.
This year’s winner is:
Renato Monteiro
Georgia Tech
George E. Kimball Medal
The George E. Kimball Medal is awarded for recognition of distinguished service to the Institute and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. The award is a commemorative engraved medallion and a framed citation.
Learn more about the Kimball Medal and how to be nominated on the INFORMS website.
This year, there are two Medal winners:
Brian Denton
University of Michigan
Les Servi
The MITRE Corporation
INFORMS Fellows Class of 2025
Congratulations to the 2025 INFORMS Fellows! We’re so excited to have you join the ranks of other great contributors to our organization.
Laura Albert
Chun-Hung Chen
John Chinneck
Gerard Cornuejols
Pooja Dewan
Yu Ding
Vivek Farias
Stefan Karisch
Erica Klampfl
Panos Kouvelis
Subramanian (Raghu) Raghavan
Daniele Vigo
Volunteer Service Award
The Volunteer Service Award was first awarded in 2016. Its purpose is to recognize exceptional volunteer service to INFORMS.
Learn more about the Volunteer Service Award on the website.
This year’s winners are:
Neil Desnoyers
Suzan Iloglue
Adam Mersereau
Kenneth Murphy
Fenglian Pan
Yifeng Wang
Segev Wasserkrug
Zihan Zhang
Saul Gass Expository Writing Award
The Saul Gass Expository Writing Award honors an operations researcher or management scientist whose publications demonstrate a consistently high standard of expository writing. The awardee’s written work, published over a period of at least 10 years, should indicate (in terms of breadth of readership) an influence and accessibility enhanced by expository excellence.
Learn more about the Saul Gass Award and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
This winner of this year’s award is:
Margaret Brandeau
Frederick W. Lanchester Prize
The Lanchester Prize is awarded for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the past five years.
Learn more about the Lanchester Prize and how to be nominated on the INFORMS website.
Boris Mordukhovich
Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award
The Lectureship is awarded in honor of Philip McCord Morse in recognition of his pioneer contribution to the field of operations research and the management sciences. The award is given in odd-numbered years at the Annual Meeting if there is a suitable recipient. The term of the lectureship is two years. The award is $2,000, a certificate, a travel fund of $5,000, a copy of Morse’s autobiography, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life, and a copy of Morse and Kimball’s Methods of Operations Research.
Learn more about the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award on the website.
This year’s winner is:
Benjamin Van Roy
Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research
This prize emphasizes the quality and coherence of the analysis used in practice. Dr. Wagner strove for strong mathematics applied to practical problems, supported by clear and intelligible writing. This prize recognizes those principles by emphasizing good writing, strong analytical content, and verifiable practice successes. This award is administered by the Practice Section of INFORMS.
Learn more about the Wagner Prize and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
Here are this year’s finalists:
Analytics for Urban Bike Infrastructure Planning: A Multi-Year Collaboration with the City of Toronto
Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher
Timothy Chan
Bo Lin
Shoshanna Saxe
DeepStock: Inventory Management with Policy Regularizations
Lei Cao
Xinru Hao
Jiaxi Liu
Will Ma
Yaqi Xie
Linwei Xin
Yidong Zhang
Optimizing Multimodal Rideshare Pricing via Quasi-Convex Efficiency Objectives
Zeyad Kassem
Hao Yi Ong
Sajjad Taghiyeh
Rebalancing and Pricing of Near-Expiry Inventory in Online Grocery Retail
Long He
Guangrui Ma
Yuanbo Peng
Zhengling Qi
Yushu Yao
Zhongyi Zha
Mingyong Zhao
Ziyuan Zhou
Zhenyu Zhuo
Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice
The purpose of this award is to recognize a teacher who has succeeded in helping their students to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be effective practitioners of operations research or the management sciences. An “effective practitioner” has respect for, understanding of, and the skills to surmount both the practical difficulties and technical challenges of doing good OR/MS work.
Learn more about the Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice on the INFORMS website.
This year’s winners are:
Nelson Uhan
Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award
This award was established by a generous endowment from the Donald P. Gaver family. The purpose of the award is to support creative and diverse work in operations research in the early career of the recipient. The candidate must be within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. and be in a tenure-track academic appointment.
Learn more about the establishment of the Gaver Award and how to be nominated on the INFORMS website.
The winner of this year’s award is:
Alexandre Jacquillat
INFORMS Case Competition
The purpose of this annual competition is to encourage the creation, dissemination, and classroom use of new, unpublished cases in operations research and the management sciences. All cases are reviewed by a panel of judges familiar with the case method.
Learn more about the Case Competition and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
This year’s finalists are:
Reinforcement Learning for Clinical Decision Support
Angela Lin
Dessislava Pachamanova
Georgia Perakis
Calyber: A Ridesharing Game
Yifan Shen
Chiwei Yan
Julia Yan
Routing for Social Good: Optimizing Human Milk Bank Logistics
Jose Antonio Carbajal
Natalia Summerville
INFORMS Scholarship
INFORMS is pleased to announce scholarships for undergraduate students to attend the 2025 Annual Meeting. This scholarship program aims to foster the professional pipeline of operations research, management science, and analytics researchers by providing undergraduate students an opportunity to experience these exciting fields and gain professional development opportunities by attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Learn more about the INFORMS Scholarship and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
Here are the 2025 winners of the scholarship:
Marco Gustavo Egaña Cortes
Fengxu Li
Dan Ni Lin
Fernando Acosta Perez
Andrew Porter
Jonas Swope
Connor Tasik
Student Chapter Annual Awards
The purpose of the Student Chapter Annual Awards is to recognize achievements of student chapters and to motivate them to perform well. The award will be given at the INFORMS Annual Meeting. All active INFORMS student chapters are eligible for this award. All student chapter officers must be current members of INFORMS at the time of Activity Report submission. Only completed submissions received by the submission deadline will be considered.
Learn more about the Student Chapter Annual Awards and previous winners on the INFORMS website.
Please help us congratulate and celebrate this year’s winners, seen below:
Summa cum laude
- University at Buffalo SUNY
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of South Florida
- Lehigh University
- University of Michigan
- Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso
Cum laude
- North Carolina State University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
- University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Koç University
- University of Texas at Dallas
- Rice University
- The Ohio State University
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Wisconsin – Madison
- Texas Tech University
Magna cum laude
- Auburn University
- Galileo University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Northwestern University
- Texas A&M University
- University of Arkansas
- University of Louisville
- University of Texas at Austin
- Clemson University
- Iowa State University
Honorable Mention
- University of Oklahoma
- Georgia Southern University
- University of Florida
- United States Coast Guard Academy
- University of Maryland
- University of Washington – Seattle
- University of Texas at Arlington
- Virginia Tech
- Claremont Colleges
- University of Illinois Chicago
Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military and Security Applications
The purpose of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Military & Security Applications is to promote the development and application of process modeling and operations research analyses to military issues. The scholarship provides funding from the Seth Bonder Scholarship Endowment and an additional $2,000 grant is funded by the Seth Bonder Foundation.
This year’s scholarship recipient is:
Ian Unson
Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services
The purpose of the Bonder Scholarship in Health Services is to promote the development and application of process modeling and O.R. analyses to healthcare design, delivery, and operations. The tenure of the award is one year. The scholarship provides funding from the Seth Bonder Scholarship Endowment and an additional $2,000 grant is funded by the Seth Bonder Foundation.
Learn more about the Bonder Scholarship for Health Services and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
This year’s scholarship recipient is:
Abel Sapirstein
Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Paper Competition
Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Paper Competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding projects in the field of operations research and the management sciences conducted by a student or student group that have a significant societal impact. Operations research and management science methods and tools (broadly interpreted) must be central to the success of the projects described.
Here are this year’s finalists:
Saving Lives: Data-Driven Optimization in Animal Shelters
Qiuxia (Katalia) Chen
SWAP: Empowering Community Collective Impact through Innovative Resource Sharing
Weixiao Huang
Learning Optimal and Fair Policies for Online Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources from Data
Bill Tang
Co-Designing Solutions to Disrupt Sex Trafficking Recruitment with Lived Experts
Baris Tezcan
George Nicholson Student Paper Competition
The George Nicholson Student Paper Competition is held each year to identify and honor outstanding student papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences.
Learn more about the Nicholson Competition and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
Here are this year’s finalists:
1st Place
Robust Paths: Geometry and Computation
Hao Hao
2nd Place
Multi-agent Markov Entanglement
Chen Shuze
Honorable Mentions
A Stochastic Growth Model for Online Platforms
Ekbatani Farbod
A Simple Uniformly Optimal Method without Line Search for Convex Optimization
Li Tianjiao
Dynamic Matching with Post-allocation Service and its Application to Refugee Resettlement
Lee Soonbong
Managing Tail Risk in Online Learning: Efficiency, Safety, Robustness, and Relationship to AlphaGo
Zhu Feng
Finalists
Maximum Load Assortment Optimization: Approximation Algorithms and Adaptivity Gaps
Ibn Brahim Marouane
Reinforcement Learning in MDPs with Information-Ordered Policies
Zhang Zhongjun
George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award
The George B. Dantzig Award is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. The award was established to encourage academic research that combines theory and practice and stimulates greater interaction between doctoral students (and their advisors) and the world of practice.
Learn more about the Dantzig Award and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
Here are this year’s finalists:
Analytics for Better Urban Cycling
Bo Lin
Understanding and Optimizing Societal Systems: Methods and Applications
Zhi Liu
Models and Algorithms for Safeguarded Data-Driven Decision Making
Aras Selvi
New Theory and New Practical Methods for Solving Large-Scale Linear and Conic Optimization
Zikai Xiong
Undergraduate Operations Research Prize
The Undergraduate Operations Research Prize Competition is held each year to honor a student or group of students who conducted a significant applied project in OR/MS, and/or original and important theoretical or applied research in OR/MS, while enrolled as an undergraduate student.
Learn more about the Undergraduate Prize and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
This year’s finalists are:
Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space Choice Model
Yiqi Yang
Exact Rounding for Fair k-Median under Quasi-Convex Costs
Alireza Danaei
Alireza Rezaeimoghadam
LLM Serving with Variable Prefill and Decode Lengths
Meixuan Wang
Power Constrained Nonstationary Bandits with Habituation and Recovery Dynamics
Fengxu Li
Survey of Data-driven Newsvendor: Unified Analysis and Spectrum of Achievable Regrets
Zhuoxin Chen
An Aggregated Partition-Based Method for Decision-Focused Learning: Application to Microgrid Energy Management
Cristofer Lizama
Prescriptive Machine Learning for Multi-Period Dynamic Nurse Deployment
Kailai Chen
Siqiang (Steven) Wang
Conformal Robust Optimization and Satisficing for Prescriptive Analytics
Lingjie Zhao
Judith Liebman Award
The Judith Liebman Award has been established to recognize outstanding student volunteers who have been “moving spirits” in their universities, their student chapters, and INFORMS.
Please help us congratulate and celebrate this year’s winners, seen below:
Nicolás Bustos
Lingchao Mao
Moving Spirit Award for Forums
The Moving Spirit Award has been established to recognize outstanding forum volunteers who have been “moving spirits” in their forum.
Learn more about the Moving Spirit Award for Forums on the INFORMS website.
This year’s winner is:
Priyank Arora
2025 Community Awards
Every year, each INFORMS Community has numerous awards to recognize the efforts of community members and volunteers.
