Speaker Bio




Dan Adelman:

Professor Dan Adelman is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he has been on the faculty since 1997. He teaches core courses in operations management in the executive, part-time and campus MBA programs. Professor Adelman holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.  He has won several academic awards, including the George B. Dantzig Prize in 1998. Professor Adelman's main research interest is to develop theory and practice for "price-directed operations management," which blends internal transfer pricing, optimization, and approximate dynamic programming. Recently, his research has focused on applications in industrial gas distribution, intermodal logistics, and classical inventory control.   He has published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, and forthcoming in Mathematics of Operations Research. He sits on the editorial board of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, IIE Transactions, and is an Associate Editor for Operations Research.




Elodie Adida:

Elodie Adida is a PhD candidate in the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Georgia Perakis. She received an Engineering Degree from "Ecole Centrale Paris", France in 2001.




Philipp Afeche:

Philipp Afeche is an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Operations and Supply Chain Management.  He holds a Ph.D. degree in Operations, Information and Technology and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research focuses on revenue management, in particular on pricing and capacity decisions in queueing systems.  Dr. Afeche is on the editorial boards of M&SOM and Electronic Commerce Research.




Chris Anderson:

Chris Anderson is an Assistant Professor at the Ivey School of Business at The University of Western Ontario, where he teaches Management Science, Statistics and Financial Modeling.  He has B.Sc. and  MSc. in Engineering from the University of Guelph and a MBA and PhD from the Ivey School of Business.  His primary research interests are in dynamic pricing and revenue management.




Opher Baron:

Opher Baron is an assistant professor of operations management at the Rotman School of Management, the University of Toronto.  He has a Ph.D. in operations management from the MIT Sloan School of Management along with an MBA and a BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.  His research interests include applied probability, pricing, and revenue management.




Peter Belobaba:

Peter P. Belobaba holds a Master of Science in Transportation and a Ph.D. in Flight Transportation Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His doctoral dissertation entitled, “Air Travel Demand and Airline Seat Inventory Management”, is widely recognized as the first Ph.D. thesis published on the topic of airline yield management.  Dr. Belobaba is currently a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he teaches graduate level courses on The Airline Industry and Airline Management, in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  He is also a Visiting Professor of Aviation Management in IATA International Aviation MBA Program at Concordia University in Montreal. Dr. Belobaba has been involved in research and consulting related to airline revenue management systems since 1985.  He manages an MIT research consortium funded by seven international airlines to explore the areas of airline demand forecasting, seat inventory management, network revenue optimization, and simulation of the competitive impacts of revenue management.  Dr. Belobaba has also worked as a consultant on the evaluation, development, simulation, implementation and testing of airline revenue management systems at over thirty airlines worldwide.  He has published articles dealing with revenue management an airline completion in Operations Research, Transportation Science, Decision Sciences, Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management and the Journal of Air Transport Management.




Dimitris Bertsimas:

Dimitris Bertsimas is currently the Boeing Professor of Professor of Operations Research at the Sloan School of Management, Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1985, a MS in Operations Research at MIT in 1987, and a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at MIT in 1988. He has been in the faculty at MIT ever since. He has worked in the areas of optimization of stochastic systems arising in manufacturing, transportation and telecommunications. He is an Area Editor for Financial Engineering in the journal Operations Research and an Associate Editor for the journal Mathematics of Operations Research. He was the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991 awarded by the National Science Foundation.




Dirk Beyer:

Dirk Beyer is a Principal Scientist in the Decision Technologies Department at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA. He holds a Master's degree in Mathematics and Physics and a PhD in Operations Research from Leipzig University, Germany. His research interests span a wide spectrum of business applications of OR including the application of analytical techniques to the design and management of computing infrastructure, Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management.




Gabriel Bitran:

Gabriel R. Bitran is a Chair Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  He is a member of the Operations Management Group.  Professor Bitran’s research interests lie in the field of manufacturing, logistics, and the service industry.  More recently he has been working on pricing for high-tech services, fashion retail goods and services, and design of bandwidth markets, as well as related revenue management problems.





Andrew Boyd:

E. Andrew Boyd is currently Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President at PROS, where he heads a group of advanced degree recipients in Economics, Operations Research, Quantitative Marketing, and Statistics. He received his A.B. with Honors at Oberlin College with majors in Mathematics and Economics in 1981, and his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 1987. Andy spent nine years as a university professor prior to joining PROS.




Agustin Cano:

Agustín Cano is working in Aeromexico since 1982. He is a VP for Systems Decision Support as well as a VP for Revenue Management and a Commercial Planning Manager. He has worked in system development & implementation and Operational Engineering. He holds an MBA “IPN México” and a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from “IPN México”.




Eric Cope:

Eric Cope received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2004 and is currently an assistant professor in the Operations and Logistics division of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC.  His main areas of interest are in stochastic control and reinforcement learning, with application to revenue management and computer networks.




William Cooper:

William L. Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Industrial Engineering  Division of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999. His research interests include stochastic modeling, revenue management, and inventory theory.




Parijat  Dube:

Parijat  Dube received his M.S. in Electrical Communication Engg. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Univeristy of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in 2002 where he was affiliated to INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France.   He joined IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York in 2002. His research interests include queueing theory,  performance evaluation and control of communications networks, sensor networks and pricing.




Awi Federgruen:

Awi Federgruen is the Charles E. Exley Professor of Management and former Senior Vice Dean at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.  Professor Federgruen joined the Columbia University faculty in 1979 after receiving his doctorate in Operations Research at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and after being a Research Fellow at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam and a faculty member at the Graduate School of Management of the University of Rochester. Professor Federgruen is a world renowned expert in the development and implementation of planning models for logistical systems, in particular in the areas of production, inventory and distribution planning for supply chain management, and the design and analysis of operations strategies for service systems.  He is also a prime contributor to various areas of quantitative methodology, in particular the areas of applied probability models and dynamic programming. He is a former Departmental Editor for the Department of Manufacturing, Service and Operations of Management Science , Associate Editor of Operations Research, and current Senior Editor of Manufacturing, Service and Operations Management, the flagship journals of his profession.  He is the author of over hundred and twenty publications, in the premier journals of his field, and he has authored a book on Markovian Control problems and numerous book chapters for important survey text books.  The recipient of a series of National Science Foundation and ARPA grants, his Ph.D. students are affiliated with some of the most influential university departments and industrial research laboratories (the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Fuqua School of Duke University, the Olin School of Washington University, the Simon School of the University of Rochester, the Business and Engineering Schools of Tel_Aviv University, the Business School and Statistics Department of the Hebrew University, IBM, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Merck).




Nelson M. Fraiman:

Nelson Fraiman is Professor of Professional Practice in the Decision, Risk and Operations division of Columbia Business School and Co-Director of the W. Edwards Deming Center for Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness. He joined the faculty in 1995 after a 17-year career at International Paper, where his last position was chief technology officer for eight manufacturing divisions.  Fraiman teaches operations and technology management. During his years with International Paper, he taught as an adjunct in Columbia College and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.  Fraiman has a B.S, M.S., M.B.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D., all from Columbia University.




Scott Friend:

Scott Friend is President and Co-Founder of ProfitLogic. His responsibilities include establishing and leading the strategic vision of how retailers can dramatically improve economic performance through enhanced merchandising decision making. He brings 15 years of experience building and delivering solutions to the retail marketplace, which includes driving business development at Learning Sciences Corporation, being a Principal at The Parthenon Group, and working in IBM's retail industry unit. Scott's academic training includes a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and economics, magna cum laude from Brown University and a master's degree with distinction from Harvard Business School. He was recently honored with Chain Store Age's "Top Retail Executives Under 40" award, which recognizes individuals who are revolutionizing retail.




Terry Friesz:

Terry L. Friesz, the first Harold and Inge Marcus Chaired Professor of Industrial Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. Prior to joining the Penn State, he was the faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania and the George Mason University. His current research focuses on the application of nonlinear programming, dynamic optimization, game theory and functional analysis to a number of areas, including supply chains; logistics and freight systems; revenue management; and dynamic pricing.




Guillermo Gallego:

Professor Gallego obtained his PhD in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University.  He has consulted extensively in the areas of Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Revenue Management and Distance Learning. He has been Associate Editor, Departmental Editor and Senior Editor of several of the flagship journals of his field and has been an invited speaker at almost all national and international universities with strong programs in Operations Research and Operations Management. Professor Gallego has been the recipient of six NSF grants and of several industrial grants to support his research activities. He has published over fifty papers in prestigious journals including seminal papers in Supply Chain, Inventory Theory and Revenue Management. His graduate students are associated with prestigious universities. He served as a Visiting Scientist at IBM from 1999-2003 and is currently the Chairman of the IEOR Department at Columbia University.  He spent his 1996-1997 Sabbatical at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.




Jeremie Gallien:

Jeremie Gallien is the J. Spencer Standish Career Development Professor in the Operations Management Group of the MIT Sloan School of Management, also a faculty member of the MIT Operations Research Center and the Leaders For Manufacturing Program. His research work focuses on mathematical models for pricing and revenue optimization, planning, scheduling and procurement in supply chains. At MIT he teaches the MBA class Introduction to Operations Management, the LFM module Managerial Simulation, and the doctoral class The Theory of Operations Management. Dr. Gallien holds an Eng.D. in Production Systems from the Ecole des Mines de Paris and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT.




Rahul Garg:

Rahul Garg completed his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1999, MS from University of California at Berkeley in 1995 and B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering  from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1993. His research interests are Applications of Game Theory in Computer Science, Integrated Services Networks and High Performance Computing. He has been working at IBM India Research Lab in Delhi since 1999. He is presently the manager of high-performance computing group at IBM India Research.




Yezekael Hayel:

Mr. Hayel is a PhD student at INRIA, in France. His research spans the field of pricing of communication networks. This work was completed while Mr. Hayel spent a summer as a visitor at IBM Research.




Craig Hopperstad:

Craig Hopperstad is currently the president of his own company, Hopperstad Consulting Inc., which is a major contributor to the field of airline planning technology. Previously, as a Project Director in the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, he was a principal in the development of passenger preference, fleet planning, scheduling and revenue management models.  He is the author of numerous papers and presentations, most of which deal with the application of the Passenger Origin/Destination Simulator (PODS) that he developed at Boeing and for which Hopperstad Consulting now holds a license.  His honors include designation as a Distinguished Member of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (AGIFORS).




Houyuan Jiang:

Dr Jiang is a University Lecturer in the Judge Institute of Management at University of Cambridge.  His research interests lie in combinatorial optimization for network design,
resource allocation and staff scheduling, mathematical programming for the development of theories and algorithms, and applied operations research on model building and implementations for real world problems such as network design, revenue management and resource allocation.




Hong Jin:

Hong Jin is Director of Revenue Analytics at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, responsible for Revenue Management planning system design and enhancement. In the past year, Mr. Jin implemented a new analytical approach in hotel pricing and inventory management at pilot hotels in a competitive metropolitan area. The new approach helps to improve hotel performance and market share significantly. Hong Jin graduated from MIT with Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and Logistics. Dr. Jin has rich experiences in planning application development and business consulting across multiple industries.




Soulaymane Kachani:

Soulaymane Kachani is an Assistant Professor at the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department of Columbia University. His research interests are in dynamic pricing and revenue optimization, logistics and supply chain management, transportation network management, game theory, variational inequalities and equilibrium problems. Before joining Columbia, he worked at McKinsey & Company. He holds a diplome d'ingenieur from Ecole Centrale Paris, an M.S. and a Ph.D. from MIT's Operations Research Center.




Edward Kambour:

Edward Kambour received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M University in 1998, and a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Moorhead State University in Moorhead, MN. His doctoral thesis introduced a Bayesian approach to statistical process control.  Ed's papers and reseach interests include Bayesian Quality Control methods (industiral and bio-stat applications), Bayesian forecasting (specifically for revenue management applications), and Sports Statistics.  He is currently the Senior Research Statistician and Manager of Forecast Science at PROS Revenue Management, where he has worked since 1998.




Chris Kenyon:

Chris Kenyon is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research, Zurich Research Laboratory (since 2000) and was previously at Schlumberger Austin Research and McGill University. He has a MCSE in Operations Research from University of Texas at Austin (1997), a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cambridge University (1989) and is a former Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge (Computer Modeling). His current research interests include price design for outsourcing contracts, regulatory compliance and risk, mathematical finance and network optimization, and real options. Email: chk[at]zurich.ibm.com.




Srinivas Krishnamoorthy:

Srinivas Krishnamoorthy is a Doctoral Candidate at Columbia Business School. His research interests are revenue management & pricing, marketing-operations interface and applied game theory. Before joining Columbia he worked at The Unit Trust of India. He holds a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras and an MBA from IIM Lucknow.




Ahmet Kuyumcu:

Mr. Ahmet Kuyumcu is Chief Scientist and Director of Operations Research at Zilliant, Inc.  He has led the design of statistical modeling and optimization algorithms for multi-million dollar pricing and revenue management systems in variety of different industries.  He is a frequent speaker in conferences on the practice of pricing and revenue management and published several articles in academic journals.  He also teaches a graduate-level pricing and revenue management class at Operations Research & Industrial Engineering Department of University of Texas at Austin.




Warren Lieberman:

Dr. Warren H. Lieberman is President of Veritec Solutions.  Founded in 1998, Veritec is a consulting and software development firm focused on helping companies improve their pricing and revenue management capabilities.  Warren is the Chair of the Revenue Management and Pricing Section of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management.   He is also serving as Committee Chair for the first INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize to be awarded for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English.  He has previously has served as Chairman of the Yield Management Study Group of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (AGIFORS), and as President of the Northern California Chapter of INFORMS.  Dr. Lieberman began his career in yield management at American Airlines in 1984. Dr. Lieberman received the B.S. degree in Mathematics with a specialization in computer science from the State University of New York at Binghamton.  He holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Yale University.




Costis Maglaras:

Costis Maglaras is an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk and Operations in the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. He joined Columbia in 1998 after receiving a BS from Imperial College, London, and an MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in EE. His interests are in stochastic modeling and operations management with particular focus on: (a) revenue management and its application in the manufacturing and service sector; (b) analysis and design of service systems, primarily motivated from information and communication services; and (c) stochastic network theory. Prior to joining Columbia, he worked at Canon Research Center America. He was awarded the 1999 Nicholson Prize for the best student paper in Operations Research and Management Science. He serves as an associate editor for several leading journals, and since 2002 has been co-organizing the annual Informs conference on Revenue Management. He teaches the MBA core course on Managerial Statistics, an elective course on Pricing and Revenue Optimization, as well as several PhD courses on stochastic modeling and operations management.




Dinesh Mehta:

Mr. Dinesh Mehta works as a Statistician with Zilliant. His primary areas of work are building statistical models and running optimization routines for a variety of client’s in order to provide optimum prices. His experience includes pricing and revenue management applications for various verticals like Electronics & Semiconductors, Rental Cars, Hotels, Multi family housing, Advertising, and Healthcare.




Lerzan Ormeci:

E. Lerzan Ormeci received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the Middle Eastern Technical University and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Case Western Reserve University in 1990, 1993 and 1998 respectively. From 1999 to 2001 she worked as a research fellow in Stochastic Networks Group of EURANDOM (European Unit for Research and Analysis of Non-Deterministic Operational Models) in the Netherlands. Since 2001, she has been with Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey as an assistant professor in the industrial engineering department. Her research focuses on Markov decision processes and queueing analysis and control, which provide a broad opportunity for interdisciplinary studies. She works on applications for call centers and telecommunications systems, as well as revenue management and pricing issues in service systems and supply chains.




Ozalp Ozer:

Ozalp Ozer is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum. His general research interests are design and control of production and distribution systems, management and coordination of supply chains, pricing and revenue management. He was recently awarded the Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Accomplishment Award from the Production and Operations Management Society in 2004, and the Eugene Grant Teaching Award in Stanford's School of Engineering by vote of students in 2003. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from Columbia University in 2000.




Georgia Perakis:

Georgia Perakis is an Associate Professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. She received an M.S. degree and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Brown University. Since the summer of 1998 she joined the faculty at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where she is currently. Georgia Perakis' research interests include applications of optimization and equilibrium in revenue management, dynamic pricing, the study of auctions and competitive supply chain management. Furthermore, her research tries to understand traffic patterns in dynamic settings. She has received the CAREER / PECASE award, the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for excellence in teaching, the Sloan Career Development Chair. Perakis has been an Associate Editor for the journal Management Science and for the journal of Naval Logistics Research, an Area Editor in the area of Supply Chain Management and Services for the journal Networks and Spatial Economics and the editor in Chief for the journal of Pricing and Revenue Management. Perakis was a member of the Informs Council and the chair of the Pricing and Revenue Management Section of the Informs society.




Robert Phillips:

Robert Phillips is Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nomis Solutions, a venture-capital backed company providing pricing and revenue optimization solutions to the financial services industry.  Prior to founding Nomis, he served as chief technology officer of Manugistics, a publicly traded price-optimization and supply chain management company and as founder and chief executive officer of Talus Solutions, a pricing and revenue management software company.
Dr. Phillips is also a lecturer at the Stanford University School of Business where he teaches a course on Pricing and Revenue Optimization.  During 2002 he was a visiting professor at Columbia University School of Business.  His research is primarily focused on new approaches to maximizing revenue in different industries. Dr. Phillips holds a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University and B.A. degrees in Economics and Mathematics from Washington State University.   His book, Pricing and Revenue Optimization is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.




Rama Ramakrishnan:

Rama Ramakrishnan is the Chief Scientist of ProfitLogic. He is responsible for developing analytic techniques that have a significant impact on a retailers' businesses and incorporating them into ProfitLogic's products and services. Prior to joining ProfitLogic, Rama was the founder and principal of Profit Sciences, an analytics consulting firm, where he advised clients on the design of optimization algorithms to solve complex resource allocation problems. Before that, Rama was the co-founder and vice president of product development at Redwood Investment Systems, a software company that built one of the first web/wireless portfolio management systems for quantitative investment managers. In addition, Rama was a Portfolio Manager at CIBC Oppenheimer, developing quantitative investment strategies, and Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, advising Global 200 senior managers on solving strategic and operational problems using analytical techniques. Rama began his career with the Decision Technologies group of American Airlines, where he worked on building model-based solutions for a variety of airline problems. Rama was recently named one of Chain Store Age’s "Rising Stars: 40 under 40".  The award, which celebrates executives who are helping to reshape the retail industry, was granted to Rama for successfully applying time-tested risk management techniques used extensively on Wall Street to help retailers identify and capitalize on opportunity areas on Main Street. Rama holds a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.




Amelia Regan:

Amelia Regan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Civil (Transportation Systems) Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Management.  Her research focus is on applications of information technologies and optimization techniques to freight and fleet management on behavioral modeling of commercial vehicle operators and logistics services providers and to general large scale combinatorial optimization problems.  Her recent research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Transportation Research Board, the University of California Transportation Center, the Caltrans PATH program and JB Hunt Transportation, Inc.  Dr. Regan earned the PhD and MSE degrees in Transportation Systems Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in Applied Mathematics from the Johns Hopkins University and a BAS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to entering the PhD program she worked as an Operations Research Analyst for UPS, Roadnet Technologies and the Association of American Railroads.




Gilles Savard:

Gilles Savard is Head of the Department of mathematics and industrial engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal and member of the board of direction of GERAD (Groupe d’études et de recherche en analyse des décisions). He received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the University of Montreal, a M.Sc.A. in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from École Polytechnique in 1989. He has published more than 50 papers in major refereed scientific journals and has organized several sessions in international scientific conferences. He is a leading expert in both the theory and practice of bilevel programming and in the development of global algorithms for nonconvex optimization. Gilles Savard has acquired a vast experience in the management of research programs. He has served as leader on large-scale projects for the Department of National Defense (Canada) in the field of aircraft scheduling, produced over 30 technical reports and delivered three complete Decision Support Systems for government agencies. He spent a full year at AdOpt Technologies as director of the Pairing Group, which employs 25 scientists involved in the development and delivery of OR-based Decision Support Systems for the airline industry. He was one of the main participants on the EUGENE project which won the award for the best OR application from the Canadian Operational Research Society.




Sergei Savin:

Sergei Savin is an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk, and Operations at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School. Savin's research interests include stochastic models of service systems, revenue management, new product diffusion models, and OR applications in the healthcare industry.




Nicola Secomandi:

Nicola Secomandi is an assistant professor of operations management and manufacturing at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. He has been a senior scientist at PROS Revenue Management, Houston, Texas, USA, a research associate at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, and a manager at El Paso Merchant Energy, Houston, Texas, USA. His research focuses on commodity operations management, in particular the interface between finance and operations management with applications in the energy industry, revenue and supply chain management, and logistics under uncertainty.




Anshul Sood:

Anshul Sood just completed his PhD at the Operations Research Center at MIT. His research interests include problems in revenue management and game theory. Prior to MIT, he graduated from IIT Delhi with a B.Tech. in Manufacturing Sciences and Engineering. He is joining Lehman Brothers at the Equity Quantitative Analytics Group.




Kalyan Talluri:

Kalyan Talluri holds a Ph.D in Operations Research from MIT and teaches in the Business department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has worked on pricing and revenue management at USAirways and has been a visiting professor and taught classes at Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, U.S.A, IESE, Barcelona, and INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. His main research is in the pricing and revenue management area. He is the co-author (with G. van Ryzin) of the first reference book on Revenue Management “The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management”.




Aurelie Thiele:

Aurélie Thiele will start as an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA in the Fall. Her research interests lie in applying robust optimization techniques to model and analyze randomness in operations management problems, in particular in revenue management. In 2003, she was awarded the first prize in the George E. Nicholson student paper competition at the INFORMS annual meeting. She holds a "diplôme d'ingénieur" from the Ecole des Mines de Paris in Paris, France (1999) as well as a M.Sc. (2000) and a PhD (2004) from MIT.




John Tsitsiklis:

John N. Tsitsiklis (Ph.D., 1984, MIT) is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a co-director of the Operations Research Center. His research interests are in the fields of systems, optimization, control, and operations research. He is a coauthor of four books, "Parallel and Distributed Computation: Numerical Methods" (1989, with D. Bertsekas), "Neuro-Dynamic Programming" (1996, with D. Bertsekas), "Introduction to Linear Optimization" (1997, with D. Bertsimas), and "Introduction to Probability" (2002, with D. Bertsekas). His awards include the INFORMS/CSTS prize (1997), and he is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is currently a member of the editorial board for the Springer-Verlag "Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences" series, and an associate editor of Mathematics of Operations Research.




Garrett van Ryzin:

Garrett van Ryzin is the Paul M. Montrone Professor of Private Enterprise at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. His research interests include stochastic optimization, pricing and revenue management and supply chain management. Professor van Ryzin’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and major corporations, and he has served as a consultant to several leading companies in the area of pricing and revenue management.  He is currently Editor in Chief of M&SOM, and has served as Area Editor for Operations Research. He is also an associate editor for Management Science and Transportation Science. He received the B.S.E.E. degree, academic honors with distinction, from Columbia University, and the degrees of S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.




Darius Walczak:
 
Darius Walczak is a Scientist at PROS Revenue Management in Houston, Texas,  where he is taking care of PROS's Optimization Engine.  He holds a Ph. D. degree in Operations & Logistics from Sauder Business School, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. along with Master's degrees in Mathematics from UBC and Applied Mathematics from Wroclaw University of Technology.  His research focuses on Revenue Management, Pricing Optimization and Dynamic Programming.




Qiong Wang:

Qiong Wang is a Member of Technical Staff with Industrial Mathematics and Economics Research Group in the Mathematical Science Center of Bell Labs.  He received from Carnegie-Mellon University his Ph.D in Engineering and Public Policy and Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His undergraduate degrees are from the School of Economics and Management and Department of Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University.  He is currently doing research on network economics and operations management, including pricing, revenue management and risk control, in telecommunications industry. He has published his work in both engineering and management journals.




Xiubin Wang:

Dr. Xiubin Wang is an assistant professor in transportation and logistics at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He holds his PhD degree in transportation logistics from the University of California at Irvine. Dr. Wang worked in the OR group at American Airlines before. He also had five years research experience in railway operations.




Laura Wynter:

Dr. Wynter has been a research staff member at IBM Watson Research Center since January, 2003. Prior to that, she held an positions jointly at INRIA and the Universite de Versailles, in France. She is presently working on advancing the use of yield management for IT resources, at IBM, and has worked as well on network equilibrium and game-theoretic models of communication and transportation networks.