Egon Balas is University Professor and the Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon. He has an undergraduate degree from Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, and doctoral degrees from the University of Brussels and the University of Paris. He immigrated to the US in 1967. His main area of research is integer and combinatorial optimization. He has published about 180 research papers and has trained 25 doctoral students. In 1995 he was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by INFORMS.