BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Professor Egon Balas

Egon Balas is University Professor of Industrial Administration and Applied Mathematics, as well as the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research, at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a doctorate in Economic Science from the University of Brussels and a doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Paris.

Professor Balas's research interests are in mathematical programming, primarily integer and combinatorial optimization. He has played a leading role in the developmant of enumerative and cutting plane techniques for 0-1 programming, and is mainly known as the developer of the approach called disjunctive programming or lift-and-project. He has also developed scheduling algorithms and software. Dr. Balas has served or is serving on the editorial boards of Operations Research, Discrete Applied Mathematics, the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Computational Optimization and Applications, the European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research etc. In 1980 Dr. Balas received the US Senior Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; in 1995 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize of INFORMS; and in 2001 he was the first American to be awarded the EURO Gold Medal of the European Association of Operational Research Societies.

Professor Balas has published over 180 articles and scientific studies in the professional literature. He is also the author of the memoir Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism. Syracuse University Press, 2000.