Saurabh Amin

Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor
 
MIT, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Saurabh Amin is Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Data, Systems and Society and the Operations Research Center at MIT. His research focuses on the design of network inspection and control algorithms for infrastructure systems resilience. He studies the effects of security attacks and natural events on the survivability of cyber-physical systems, and designs incentive mechanisms to reduce network risks. Dr. Amin received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. His research is supported by NSF CPS FORCES Frontiers project, NSF CAREER award, Google Faculty Research award, DoD-Science of Security Program, and Siebel Energy Institute Grant.

Hamsa Balakrishnan

Associate Department Head; Associate Professor
 
MIT, Aeronautics & Astronautics

Hamsa Balakrishnan is Associate Department Head and an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the Director of Transportation@MIT. Her current research interests are in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation systems. These include airport congestion control algorithms, air traffic routing and airspace resource allocation methods, machine learning for weather forecasts and flight delay prediction, and methods to mitigate environmental impacts. Her research spans theory and practice, including both algorithm development and real-world field tests.

Cynthia Barnhart

Chancellor; Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering
 
MIT, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Cynthia Barnhart is MIT’s Chancellor and the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering. At MIT, she previously served as Associate and Acting Dean for the School of Engineering and co-directed the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation and Logistics. Her research focuses on building mathematical programming models and large-scale optimization approaches for transportation and logistics systems. Barnhart is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as the President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences and in editorial roles for the flagship journals in her discipline.

Dimitris Bertsimas

Boeing Professor of Operations Research; Codirector, Operations Research Center
 
MIT, Sloan School of Management

Dimitris Bertsimas is currently the Boeing Professor of Operations Research and the Co-director of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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. Since 1988, he has been with the MIT faculty. Since the 1990s he has started several successful companies in the areas of financial services, asset management, health care, publishing, analytics and aviation.

Daniel Bienstock

Fu Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
 
Columbia University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

Daniel Bienstock is a Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he has been since 1989, with joint affiliation in the departments of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering. He received the PhD at ORC in 1985 working with Tom Magnanti. His research focuses on nonconvex optimization, and on applications of mathematics and computing to power grid problems. He is an Informs Fellow and is the editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming Computation.

Jonathan Caulkins

H. Guyford Stever University Professor Of Operations Research And Public Policy
 
Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College

Jonathan Caulkins is the Stever University Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Jon specializes in systems analysis of problems pertaining to illicit and irregular markets including drugs, terror, violence, and their prevention – work that won the David Kershaw Award from the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, a Robert Wood Johnson Health Investigator Award, and the INFORMS President’s Award. Issues surrounding marijuana legalization have been a particular focus in recent years, and his most recent book is Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know.

He has been affiliated with RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center for over 25 years, including serving as co-director from 1994 – 1996. Dr. Caulkins received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Systems Engineering from Washington University, and a masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from M.I.T.

Vijay Chandru

INAE Distinguished Technologist, Indian Institute of Science
 
Founder Director, Strand Life Sciences Pvt Ltd

Vijay Chandru had his formal training in Electrical Engineering (BITS, Pilani), in Systems Science and Engineering (UCLA) and in Operations Research (MIT). Building on this foundation, he has had over 35 years of experience straddling various geographies, academic environments and industries. A fellow of both the Indian Academy of Science and the Indian National Academy of Engineering, his academic career in teaching and research in computational mathematics was substantially at Purdue University (1982-92) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) since 1992. He has held visiting positions at University of Pennsylvania, IBM Watson Research Center, MIT and Stanford University.

As a technology entrepreneur he was one of the inventors of the award winning Simputer® and currently serves as the Founder Director of Strand Life Sciences, both spinoffs from IISc. Strand, which he led from 2001 to 2017, is now India’s leading precision medicine company and the fifth largest clinical diagnostics company with 27 labs and 850 employees across India. Vijay was named a Technology Pioneer of the World Economic Forum in 2006 and awarded the President’s Medal of INFORMS the same year. He has served as the President of ABLE, the biotechnology industry apex body in India from 2009-2012. In 2017-2018, he has served as the President of the Operational Research Society of India. In July 2018, Vijay was appointed as a national distinguished technologist at the Indian Institute of Science.

Adam Elmachtoub

Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
 
Columbia University

Adam Elmachtoub is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he is also a member of the Data Science Institute. In 2014-2015, he spent one year at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center working in the area of Smarter Commerce. He previously received his B.S. degree from Cornell ORIE in 2009, and his Ph.D. from MIT ORC in 2014. In 2016, he received an IBM Faculty Award and was named Forbes 30 under 30 in science.

Ozlem Ergun

Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
 
Northeastern University

Dr. Ozlem Ergun is a professor at Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University. Dr. Ergun’s research focuses on design and management of large-scale and decentralized networks. She has applied her work on network design, management, and resilience to problems arising in many critical systems including transportation, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. She has worked with organizations that respond to emergencies and humanitarian crises around the world, including USAID, UNWFP, UNHCR, IFRC, OXFAM America, CARE USA, FEMA, USACE, CDC, AFCEMA, and MedShare International. Dr. Ergun is currently serving as a member of the National Academies Committee on Building Adaptable and Resilient Supply Chains after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Within INFORMS, Dr. Ergun has been a leader in establishing a strong community of OR/MS professionals with an interest in public programs. She was the Past-President, President, and President-elect of INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service and Needs, 2012-2014. She currently serves as the Area Editor at the Operations Research journal for Policy Modeling and the Public Sector Area. Dr. Ergun is also a founding co-chair of the Health and Humanitarian Logistics Conference, held annually since 2009. In addition, Dr. Ergun was the Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition on the INFORMS Board of Directors, 2011 - 2015. Prior to joining Northeastern she was the Coca-Cola Associate Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also co-founded and co-directed the Health and Humanitarian Systems Research Center at the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. She received a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.

Vishal Gupta

Assistant Professor
 
USC Marshall School of Business

Vishal Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Data Sciences and Operations at the USC Marshall School of Business. Vishal earned his B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University, graduating Magna Cum Laude with honors, and completed Part III of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge with distinction as part of the Paul Mellon Graduate Fellowship. After Cambridge, Gupta spent four years working as a “quant” at Barclays Capital in London (and later in New York) focusing on commodities modeling, derivatives pricing and risk management. Realizing how much he missed research working towards a larger mission of impact, he left private industry to earn his Ph.D. at the MIT ORC, where he graduated in 2014. Since then he has taught Operations and Data Analysis for Decision Making at Marshall, won several prestigious grants and awards for his research on data-driven decision-making, and was awarded the Thompson Prize for Teaching and Learning Innovation in 2016.

Dan Iancu

Associate Professor of Operations, Information and Technology

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Dan Iancu is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. A native of Romania, Prof. Iancu holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale University, an S.M. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT. Prior to joining Stanford, he spent one year as a Goldstine Fellow in the Risk Analytics Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Soulaymane Kachani

Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Senior Vice Dean and Professor

Columbia University

Soulaymane Kachani serves as Columbia University’s Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. In this role, he oversees the development of the university’s strategies for teaching and learning and educational innovation, and supports schools, colleges and departments in offering new and extending existing on-campus, online and hybrid courses and programs to audiences at Columbia and around the world. He also serves as Senior Vice Dean of Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science where he is a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He received an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT and a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in Applied Mathematics from École Centrale Paris.

Edward Kaplan

William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research

Yale School of Management

Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, Public Health, and Engineering at Yale University’s School of Management. An expert in operations research, mathematical modeling and statistics, Kaplan was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). His research in HIV prevention and counter-terrorism has been recognized with the Edelman Award, Lanchester Prize, Centers for Disease Control’s Charles C. Shepard Science Award, INFORMS President’s Award, three Koopman Prizes, and numerous other awards. Kaplan was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor of medicine and of statistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and also served as a visiting professor to the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the Survey Research Center at UC Berkeley, Columbia’s Graduate School of Business, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In 2014, Kaplan was elected to a three year term as INFORMS President-Elect (2015), President (2016), and Past-President (2017).

Ilan Lobel

Associate Professor

New York University's Stern School of Business

Ilan Lobel is an Associate Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He is interested in questions of pricing, learning and contract design in dynamic and networked markets. He serves as an Associate Editor for the journals Management Science and Operations Research. He is currently the chair-elect of the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section, and is one of the co-organizers of the annual Workshop on Marketplace Innovation. He earned his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from PUC-Rio University in Brazil and his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Philip Ma

Senior Executive & Biotechnology Entrepreneur

Seer Biosciences

Philip Ma is the Chief Business Officer and President for Seer Biosciences. Previously, he was Vice-President for Digital Health Technologies and Data Sciences at Biogen, a group that he established in 2015 to discover insights and create value for Biogen, and its patients. Prior to joining Biogen, Philip was Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, where he served global leaders in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors, leading the West Coast Healthcare Practice and global Personalized Medicine practice for the Firm. Active in community affairs, Philip also serves on the Board of Committee of 100, a group of Chinese-American business and community leaders focused on U.S.-China relations and the Asia-American experience. Before McKinsey, Philip was a macromolecular crystallographer in the lab of Dr. Carl O. Pabo at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in Biology. Philip also has degrees in Biochemistry (A.B. from Harvard College) and in Economics (MPhil from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar).

Allison O’Hair

Lecturer in Management, Stanford Business School

Chief Data Scientist, Assurance

Allison O’Hair is a Lecturer of Operations, Information, and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Chief Data Scientist for Assurance, an InsureTech start-up.

In her role as a Lecturer at Stanford, she has developed an advanced optimization class using Python and Gurobi for first-year MBA students, and helped "flip the classroom" for the required "Data & Decisions" MBA course. Before joining the Stanford GSB, she was a Lecturer of Operations Research and Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she helped develop and teach the course “The Analytics Edge”.

Prior to being the Chief Data Scientist at Assurance, she has held various other positions in industry, including a Data Science Consultant for Sequoia Capital, and the Chief Executive Officer for Quanttus, a heart health wearables start-up.

Carolina Osorio

Associate Professor

MIT, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Carolina Osorio research focuses on simulation-based optimization algorithms for, and analytical probabilistic modeling of, congested urban road networks. She was recognized as one of the outstanding early-career engineers in the US by the NAE's EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, an MIT Technology Review EmTech Colombia TR35 Award, an IBM Faculty Award and a European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Asuman Ozdaglar

Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of EECS; Associate Department Head, EECS

MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Since completing her graduate studies at MIT in 2003, Dr. Ozdaglar has been a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. She is affiliated with LIDS and the Operations Research Center. Her research focuses on problems that arise in the analysis and optimization of large-scale dynamic multi-agent networked systems including communication networks, transportation networks, and social and economic networks.

Rama Ramakrishnan

Senior Vice President, Data Science, Commerce Cloud

Salesforce

Rama is a serial data science entrepreneur and seasoned technology executive and is very active in the startup ecosystem as an advisor, angel investor and board member.

His most recent startup, CQuotient, built a machine-learning-based personalization platform for retail and e-commerce. Rama founded CQuotient in 2010 with backing from Bain Capital Ventures and led the company to a successful exit to Demandware (NYSE: DWRE) in 2014. As a member of the Demandware executive team, Rama was involved in the successful sale of Demandware to Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) in July 2016 for $2.8 billion. Prior to CQuotient, Rama taught data science at MIT, was Chief Scientist at price-optimization pioneer ProfitLogic, was VP of R&D for the retail business of Oracle, founded two analytics companies, and consulted at McKinsey.

Rama has an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from MIT.

David Shmoys

Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management & Leadership Studies

School of Operations Research and Information Engineering Cornell University

David Shmoys is the Laibe/Acheson Professor at Cornell University in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and also the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Shmoys's research has been on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, both deterministic and stochastic, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, network design, and computational sustainability. Most recently, his work has focused on issues in mobility and the sharing economy, with particular attention to the development of algorithmic tools to design and support bike-sharing systems. His graduate-level text, The Design of Approximation Algorithms, co-authored with David Williamson, was awarded the 2013 INFORMS Lanchester Prize. He is an INFORMS Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, a SIAM Fellow, and was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator; he has served on numerous editorial boards, and is currently an Area Editor for Optimization for Operations Research and an Associate Editor of Mathematics of Operations Research.

John Silberholz

Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations

Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

John Silberholz is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business in the Technology and Operations Area. John's research is in data-driven modeling and decision-making -- broadly construed -- with a current emphasis on healthcare applications related to population screening for cancer and clinical trial design. John's teaching focus is on data analytics courses, and he currently teaches an MBA elective course on software tools for big data. Before joining Michigan Ross in 2017, he received his PhD in 2015 from the MIT Operations Research Center and was a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at MIT Sloan.

Chung-Piaw Teo

Provost's Chair Professor

NUS Business School

CP (Chung-Piaw Teo) graduated from MIT ORC in 1996, under the supervision of Dimitris Bertsimas. He is now Provost Chair Professor and Director of the Institute of OR and Analytics in the National University of Singapore. Prior to his current appointments, he was a Head of Department, Acting Deputy Dean, Vice-Dean of the Research & PhD Program as well as Chair of the PhD Committee in the NUS Business School. He was an Eschbach Scholar in Northwestern University (US), Professor in Sungkyunkwan Graduate School of Business (Korea), and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in YuanZe University (Taiwan). He is currently spearheading an effort to develop the Institute on Operations Research and Analytics, as part of the University's strategic initiatives in the Smart Nation Research Program. His research interests lie in service and manufacturing flexibility, discrete optimization, ports container operations, matching and exchange, and healthcare.

Lawrence M. Wein

The Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Lawrence M. Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He received a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research at Stanford University in 1988. He was a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 1988 to 2002. His research interests are in operations management and public health, including problems in mathematical biology and homeland security. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005. He has been awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Erlang Prize, the Koopman Prize, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Omega Rho Lectureship, the INFORMS President’s Award, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, the George E. Kimball Medal, and a best paper award from Risk Analysis. He is an INFORMS Fellow, a M&SOM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Nataly Youssef

CEO

RECLAIM (MyA Health Inc)

Nataly is also the CEO of RECLAIM (MyA Health Inc), a financial wellness application whose mission is to reduce the healthcare cost burden on both individuals and their insurers. By analyzing past healthcare usage, Reclaim notifies users of potential savings on past bills, predicts future care pathway and therefore the user's healthcare and budgeting needs, and optimizes their insurance network to best mitigate their financial risk and that of their insurer. In addition to Reclaim, Nataly is a partner at P2 Analytics advising the efforts around patient flow management through information transparency, census prediction and optimal procedure scheduling. Nataly also advises the data science effort at Benefits Science Technologies around member healthcare cost prediction, stop loss optimization, and gaps in care. Nataly has held analytics bootcamp training sessions for McKinsey analysts, participated in the design of "The Analytics Edge" MOOC, and taught analytics to executive MBAs at MIT. Nataly has a PhD in Operations Research from MIT where her dissertation focused on performing stochastic analysis under a robust optimization lens.

Janie Yu

Partner

Fung Capital

Janie is a partner at Fung Capital, one of the few venture capital firms with 100% focus on B2B technology companies that enable omni-channel commerce and improve supply chain efficiency. Some of the companies include Narvar, Celect, Flow, Tulip Retail, ThirdChannel, Centric, Hooklogic, Olapic, GTNexus, etc.

Fung Capital is the investment arm of the Fung family in Hong Kong which separately controls the Fung Group that sources, distributes, and retails consumer products globally. The Fung Group of companies include Li & Fung, Global Brands Group, and Fung Retailing, with over US$25 billion in total revenues and 45,000 employees in over 40 countries.

Prior to joining Fung Capital, Janie was with Burt’s Bees, learning about different aspects of the retail industry. Before starting her business career, she was a journalist for BBC and PRI’s “The World”, reporting in China.

Janie obtained her M.A. degree from Harvard University, where she received the prestigious Fung Fellowship, sponsored by the Victor and William Fung Foundation. Janie grew up in China and received her B.A. in journalism from Communications University of China, graduating with first-class honor.

Tauhid Zaman

Associate Professor of Operations Management
 
Sloan School of Management

Tauhid is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received his BS, MEng, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

His research focuses on solving operational problems involving social network data, with an emphasis on national security and intelligence problems. Some of the topics he studies include finding online extremists, identifying bots, and running influence campaigns.

His broader interests cover data driven approaches to investing in startup companies, algorithms for sports betting, and performance prediction using wearable sensors.

His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Mashable, the LA Times, and Time Magazine.

Eric Zarybnisky

Materiel Leader
 
United States Air Force

Eric Zarybnisky began his career at the United States Air Force Academy and spent a semester on exchange to the United States Naval Academy. His previous assignments include Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training, launch vehicle engineering and analysis, satellite architecture analysis, command of a launch squadron, and graduate studies in Operations Research focusing on UAV tasking, maintenance scheduling, and combinatorial optimization. He also deployed to Southwest Asia. In his most recent assignment he completed Senior Developmental Education at the United States Naval War College.