Welcome to the Awards Hall! Please check back each day to view the prizes and competitions occurring on that day.
Tuesday, October 18
Amazon SCOT and INFORMS Scholarships
This scholarship program, sponsored by Amazon SCOT, aims to foster the professional pipeline of operations research, management science, and analytics researchers by providing undergraduate juniors and seniors as well as graduate students from underrepresented groups an opportunity to experience these exciting fields and gain professional development opportunities by attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting. Learn more about the Amazon SCOT and INFORMS scholarships and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
The year’s scholarships winners are:
Julia Bitencourt
Oriana Calderon
Brenda Cobena
Laya Dudi
Vitor Farias Costa de Carvalho
Esneyder Gonzalez
Cristóbal Heredia
Adrian Hernandez
Juan Pablo Morande
Anh Phuong Ngo
Ridwan Olabiyi
Swati Padmanabhan
Miguel Peinado-Guerrero
Natalie Randall
Mary Lizbeth Rojas
INFORMS Scholarship
INFORMS is pleased to announce scholarships for undergraduate students to attend the 2022 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 2022 winners of the scholarship:
Kathryn Dullerud
Forrest Miller
Natasha Patnaik
Nishant Shrestha
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. Learn more about the Judith Liebman Award, previous winners, and how to make a nomination on the INFORMS website.
Please help us congratulate and celebrate this year’s winners, seen below:
Sajjad Biyouki
Lauren L. Czerniak
Christian Zamiela
Student Chapter Annual Awards
The purpose of the Student Chapter Annual Awards is to recognize achievements of student chapters. Learn more about the Student Chapter Annual Awards and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
Summa cum laude
University at Buffalo Student Chapter
Magna cum laude
Georgia Tech Student Chapter
University of Toronto Student Chapter
University of Washington Tacoma Student Chapter
Virginia Tech Student Chapter
Cum laude
Clemson University Student Chapter
Concordia University (MORSC) Student Chapter
North Carolina State University Student Chapter
Rutgers University Student Chapter
University of Arkansas Student Chapter
University of Iowa Student Chapter
University of Louisville Student Chapter
University of Oklahoma Student Chapter
Honorable Mention
Texas Tech University Student Chapter
University of Alabama Student Chapter
University of Massachusetts Amherst Student Chapter
University of Minnesota Student Chapter
Monday, October 17
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:
Katherine Adams
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. Learn more about the Bonder Scholarship for Military and Security Applications and how to apply on the INFORMS website.
This year’s scholarship recipient is:
Soumyadeep Hore
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:
Yao Xie
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:
Burcu Keskin
The teaching of OR/MS practice is built on course variety, innovative materials, and classroom presence. However, truly achieving teaching excellence is demonstrated when students think critically and can use their knowledge to solve real-life operational challenges. Dr. Keskin’s accomplishments exceed all these criteria. Her teaching approach – described by former students as “inspirational, empowering, and providing superior mentorship” – has benefited a constant stream of successful practitioners.
Junmin Shi
The teaching of OR/MS practice is built on course variety, innovative materials, and classroom presence. However, truly achieving teaching excellence is demonstrated when students think critically and can use their knowledge to solve real-life operational challenges. Dr. Shi’s accomplishments exceed all these criteria. His teaching approach – described by former students as “hands-on and exceptionally engaging” – has benefited a constant stream of successful practitioners.
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:
Warren Powell
Professor Warren Powell is a prolific writer and communicator whose contributions have helped to significantly shape and advance methods of operations research, and whose writings have impacted practice and policy. Author of hundreds of scholarly articles and multiple books, his works have received well over 20,000 citations. Professor Powell’s books on approximate dynamic programming have inspired researchers and shaped the minds of many in our field. His writings have helped build a path to optimal learning methods that have become a focus of whole communities of researchers and practitioners in recent years. Through his relentless efforts to show and explain how to overcome the “curse of dimensionality,” his work has had major impact on practice in areas ranging from freight transportation to the smart grid. His methodologies have informed research across engineering and computer science disciplines. Also noteworthy is his undying efforts to create a common language to unite works in disparate fields, a notion that no doubt recognizes that exposition is as important as the math in advancing the field together.
For these many reasons, Professor Powell’s contributions to operations research have been recognized through numerous awards for his scholarly publications, including the prestigious INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society’s Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award.
For his outstanding contributions to the INFORMS community and operations research, expository excellence in his publications making his work broadly accessible, impact, and the courage to see what is possible, Warren Powell is richly deserving of the Saul Gass Award.
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:
Vijay V. Vazirani
The 2022 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize is awarded to Vijay Virkumar Vazirani for his fundamental and sustained contributions to the design of algorithms, including approximation algorithms, computational complexity theory, and algorithmic game theory, central to operations research and the management sciences.
While a first year Ph.D. student, Vazirani developed what is still the most efficient algorithm for the classical maximum matching problem, with fellow student Silvio Micali. His co-authored seminal 1990 paper proposed an optimal algorithm for the online bipartite matching problem, in which the underlying graph is revealed one vertex at a time and needs to be instantaneously matched without knowledge of future arrivals. Numerous matching markets, including Google’s AdWords, Uber, and Airbnb, share this online decision-making feature, and this algorithm has become a paradigm in this area. More recent joint work introduced a tradeoff-revealing family of linear programs and the notion of bid-scaling – ideas that have had enormous influence within digital advertising markets.
In addition, Vazirani is known for his role in developing approximation algorithms for NP-hard optimization problems, including set covering, survivable network design, multicommodity flow and multicut, k-cuts, facility location, and k-medians, culminating in his now classic book, Approximation Algorithms. He has been a major contributor to the primal-dual approach that is now recognized as the most powerful algorithmic design technique within this area.
Vazirani is one of the founders of algorithmic game theory, focusing on the computability of market equilibria. In a 2012 paper, he introduced the notion of a rational convex program, established that they “behave like” linear programs, and showed that certain market equilibria programs have this property. He and his co-authors also provided complementary pivot algorithms for markets under additively-separable, piecewise-linear concave utilities and markets with production, thereby yielding practical tractability for this class of problems. In other joint work, he gave the first polynomial-time algorithm for a market model, namely the Fisher market with linear utility functions.
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.
The winners of this year’s prize are:
Lectures on Convex Optimization
Yurii Nesterov
The book has arguably the most comprehensive treatment of algorithmic continuous optimization. By developing both foundational results and recent breakthroughs, its publication has advanced the state of the art in operations research and its extensions in science, engineering, computer science, and machine learning.
Learning to Optimize via Posterior Sampling, an Information-Theoretic Analysis of Thompson Sampling, Learning to Optimize via Information-directed Sampling, a Tutorial on Thompson Sampling
Daniel Russo
Benjamin Van Roy
The book has arguably the most comprehensive treatment of algorithmic continuous optimization. By developing both foundational results and recent breakthroughs, its publication has advanced the state of the art in operations research and its extensions in science, engineering, computer science, and machine learning.
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:
Michael Fu
Michael Fu is an exemplary academic when it comes to professional service – a model for young academics to emulate. He has served in numerous distinct and significant roles both within INFORMS and across the broader operations research community. He has served on numerous journal editorial boards for INFORMS journals (including the Operations Research Simulation Area Editor and the Management Science Stochastic Models and Simulation Department Editor). He has undertaken leadership roles for numerous INFORMS conferences, including serving as the general co-chair of the 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, cluster chair for the 2018 INFORMS International Conference, and program chair for the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). He also served on the INFORMS Board of Directors from 2017-2018 as treasurer. He has provided tireless service to the broader INFORMS and international communities, including serving as the NSF Program Director for Operations Research. Michael’s altruistic character traits that permeate his personal life are the very same ones that have made him a valuable and dedicated contributor to INFORMS.
Ranganath Nuggehalli, CAP
Ranganath Nuggehalli is the chief scientist of UPS. He is an Edelman Award winner for what has been called “arguably the world’s largest operations research project.” During his tenure, UPS became the only company to win multiple INFORMS prizes. Dr. Nuggehalli has provided high-impact service to the profession since joining ORSA more than 30 years ago. He conceived the INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize and spearheaded its creation. Awarded to an academic program for effective and innovative preparation of practitioners, the prize is regarded as the highest honor in O.R. education globally. The unique competition provides needed benchmarks and has positively impacted O.R. education and the discipline itself. More than $100K over 10 years has been awarded in cash prizes. Dr. Nuggehalli served as president of the INFORMS Practice Section, and an officer of the INFORMS Roundtable and Service Science Section. He was an inaugural recipient of the INFORMS Volunteer Service Award and a founding CAP. For his many contributions to the field of O.R. and his distinguished service to INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation to Ranganath Nuggehalli by awarding him the 2022 George E. Kimball Medal.
INFORMS Impact Prize
The Impact Prize, awarded once every two years, is intended to recognize widespread impact in the practice of operations research. It may be awarded to an individual or a single set of collaborators. The award may be given for the original research (if these ideas have been widely adopted), and/or for special efforts required to bring the research to a practical form (e.g., implementation as a software package or the communication of a body of research through writings, teaching, and consulting). The important criteria are breadth of use in practice and relevance to operations research. The technical assessment of the quality of the work is considered secondary to the degree to which it has been widely adopted. Learn more about the INFORMS Impact Prize on the INFORMS website.
This year’s winners are:
Yu Ding
Jianhua Huang
Hoon Hwangbo
Giwhyun Lee
Abhinav Prakash
Rui Tuo
Use of alternative sources of energy is key for protection of both the environment and economic prosperity of the society. Making use of wind power in particular has posed challenges in multiple areas of science. Indeed, the Paris Agreement, entered during the 2021 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, requires that we double wind power growth immediately, or triple it by 2030. Lowering costs of wind turbines and increasing their productivity in service is crucial for making wind energy competitive in the energy markets. Yet, evaluating the effectiveness of wind turbine design innovations in the field has been difficult due to high uncertainty in natural wind flow and impracticality of imposing operator control over it.
For more than a decade, Dr. Ding and his research colleagues have expanded efforts to develop novel data science approaches that address the challenge of devising accurate and effective quantification methods of wind turbine performance. Their approach, which relies on a paradigm shift from purely physical law-based methods toward analytics-driven field-wide observational methods of performance inference, boasts high accuracy while breaking the disciplinary barriers in turbine performance evaluation and comparison. In the method, the hybrid power curve model connects the multivariate wind/environmental inputs with the power output, while mitigating the scalability issues that often plague kernel-based function regression methods in real-life applications.
Through publications, software packages, field work, lectures, and webinars, Dr. Ding and his colleagues have ensured that new performance quantification ideas and methods, grounded in data analytics, are accessible to a broad audience in academia and the wind industry. Their work has affected practices within quantitative departments in a number of wind power companies worldwide. Groups in EDP Renewables North America, Smart Blade Germany, and engineers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, have testified on the value of the innovation, its robustness in a variety of use cases, and production benefits achieved and documented thanks to the ideas, methods, and tools of Dr. Ding and his team.
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:
Candace Yano
The 2022 INFORMS President’s Award is awarded to Dr. Candace Arai Yano for her many research contributions, her impact on educating future O.R. professionals, and for her extensive INFORMS service.
Dr. Yano is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research and the Operations and Information Technology Management group in the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. She holds the Kalbach Chair in Business Administration and the Morris Chang Distinguished Chair in the Management of Technology Innovation. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she worked at Bell Labs and University of Michigan. She received multiple degrees, including her Ph.D., from Stanford University.
Dr. Yano’s research focuses on supply chain management and interdisciplinary problems involving operations management and marketing. She also gives back to the community via her work with nonprofit organizations. Example projects include allocation of scarce resources in hospital systems and helping consortia of research libraries determine how many copies of books to retain in view of risks of loss and decay. She often includes students in this pro-bono work, thereby instilling in them an interest in O.R.
As the first female department chair in the College of Engineering and first Asian-American female associate dean for academic affairs at Haas, Dr. Yano is a role model for women, especially those straddling different cultures. She co-founded the INFORMS Forum for Women in OR/MS (WORMS) and is a recipient of the WORMS Award. Dr. Yano spearheaded the establishment of the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society and was recognized with the MSOM Distinguished Service Award for her efforts in MSOM’s formative years, including co-organizing the first conference of an ORSA special interest group that became a part of MSOM. Dr. Yano is a fellow of INFORMS and of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers. She was awarded the George E. Kimball Medal in recognition of her distinguished service to INFORMS and the profession of operations research and the management sciences.
Dr. Yano has served in many volunteer roles within INFORMS for more than three decades, including spearheading the Career Fair, serving as VP of Marketing and Outreach, and in leadership roles on conference organization committees. INFORMS is extremely grateful to Dr. Yano for her extensive and outstanding editorial work with multiple INFORMS journals. Her dedicated efforts in this area will have a lasting impact on future generations of O.R. professionals.
Sunday, October 16
2022 Community Awards
Every year, each INFORMS Community has numerous awards to recognize the efforts of community members and volunteers.
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:
Winner:
Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure
Luis Costa
Vivek F. Farias
Patricio Foncea
Jingyuan (Donna) Gan
Ayush Garg
Ivo Rosa Montenegro
Kumarjit Pathak
Tianyi Peng
Dusan Popovic
AI vs. Human Buyers: A Study of Alibaba’s Inventory Replenishment System
Shuyi Lin
Jiaxi Liu
Linwei Xin
Yidong Zhang
Human-centric Parcel Delivery at Deutsche Post with Operations Research and Machine Learning
Uğur Arıkan
Thorsten Kranz
Baris Cem Sal
Severin Schmitt
Jonas Witt
Reshaping National Organ Allocation Policy
James Alcorn
Dimitris Bertsimas
Rebecca Goff
Theodore Papalexopoulos
Darren Stewart
Nikolaos Trichakis
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. Learn more about the Doing Good with Good O.R. competition and how to apply in the future on the INFORMS website.
Here are this year’s finalists:
First place:
Optimizing Vaccine Distribution in Developing Countries under Natural Disaster Risk
Bonn Kleiford Seranilla
Second place:
Optimization & Planning of Limited Resources for Assisting Nonprofits in Improving Maternal Health
Aditya Mate
Designing School Choice for Diversity in San Francisco
Maxwell Allman
Katherine Mentzer
Mobin Yahyazadeh
Discovering Opportunities in New York City’s Discovery Program
Xuan Zhang
Prediction-driven Surge Planning with Application in the Emergency Department
Yue Hu
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:
Winner:
Moneyball for Murderball: Using Analytics to Construct Lineups in Wheelchair Rugby
Timothy Chan
Craig Fernandes
Albert Loa
Nathan Sandholtz
Runner-up:
To Catch a Thief: Explainable AI in Insurance Fraud Detection
Antoine Desir
Laura Heely
Ville Satopaa
Eric Sibony
Digitizing Spare Parts Supply Chain via 3D Printing – An Operational Cost Analysis
William McCall
Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song
Yue Zhang
Elections Management: Exploring the Complexity of Polling Place Consolidation
Adam Schmidt
INFORMS Fellows Class of 2022
Congratulations to the 2022 INFORMS Fellows! We’re so excited to have you join the ranks of other great contributors to our organization. View previous Fellows classes and learn more about the process to elect a Fellow on the INFORMS website.
Rajan Batta
William Browning
Richard Church
Elsayed Elsayed
Julie Simmons Ivy
Daniel Kuhn
Anne Robinson
Andrew Schaefer
Katya Scheinberg
Karen Smilowitz
Julie Swann
Enver Yücesan
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:
Winner:
Learning and Earning Under Noise and Uncertainty
Su Jia
Honorable Mentions:
Causal Inference for Social and Engineering Systems
Anish Agarwal
Data-driven Operations in Changing Environments
Ruihao Zhu
Faster Algorithms for Steiner Tree and Related Problems: From Theory to Practice
Daniel Rehfeldt
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:
First place:
The Gittins Policy is Nearly Optimal in the M/G/k under Extremely General Conditions
Isaac Grosof
Ziv Scully
Second place:
The Fragility of Optimized Bandit Algorithms
Lin Fan
On the Robustness of Second-Price Auctions in Prior-Independent Mechanism Design
Jerry Anunrojwong
Small Shadows of Lattice Polytopes
Alexander Black
Tight Guarantees for Multiunit Prophet Inequalities and Online Stochastic Knapsack
Jiashuo Jiang
Testing Network Correlation Efficiently via Counting Trees
Sophie Yu
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:
Characterization of Mobility Patterns With a Hierarchical Clustering of Origin-Destination GPS Taxi Data
Cristóbal Heredia
Constructing Branching Trees of Geostatistical Simulations
Juan Valencia
Distributionally Robust Recourse Action
Ngoc Bui
Duy Nguyen
On the Strength of Lagrangian Duality for Multiobjective Integer Programs
Matthew Brun
Sample Complexity of Policy Learning for Inventory Control with Censored Demand
Xiaoyu Fan
The Non-Markovian Nature of Nested Logit Choice
Selena Li
The Probability Mass Function of the Kaplan-Meier Product-Limit Estimator
Yuxin Qin
The Way: “Safest” Way Out
Beyza Cekinel
Lara Gorur
İlkim Guneri
