BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Professor Thomas L. Magnanti

Thomas L. Magnanti currently serves as Dean of Engineering and as one of fourteen Institute Professors at MIT, where he has been a faculty member since 1971.  He has devoted much of his professional career to education that combines engineering and management and to teaching and research in applied and theoretical aspects of large-scale optimization.

Dr. Magnanti is the co-author or editor of four books and numerous research publications.  He was a founding co-director of MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing Program and of the Institute’s System Design and Management Program.  He has previously served as co-director of MIT’s interdepartmental Operations Research Center and as head of the Management Science Area (about one-third) of the Sloan School.  He is a past President of both the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Operations Research. 

Professor Magnanti serves on the Boards of the Ford Design Institute and of Emptoris, Incorporated.  He has previously served on the Science and Technology Council of Inland Steel and has been an Academic in Residence at SABRE Technology Solutions and at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Professor Magnanti has received ORSA’s Lanchester Prize for best publication and ORSA’s Kimball Medal and the MIT Billard Award for distinguished service.  He holds honorary degrees from Linköping University, the University of Montreal, and the Université Catholique de Louvain and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.