Tom McCormick was an undergraduate major in Mathematics at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, and got his doctorate in Operations Research at Stanford University in 1983. He spent six years at the IEOR Department at Columbia University, and has been at UBC since 1989. He was promoted to Associate in 1993, to Full in 1998, and was named WJ Van Dusen Professor of Management in 2000. He was Chair of the Operations and Logistics Division from 2000-2004.
Tom's research looks at optimizing mathematical models of business processes. He is particularly interested in flows in networks, models involving submodularity, parametric problems, scheduling problems, routing problems, and supply chain management. Much of this research has been to probe the boundary between tractible and intractable problems, and to find faster algorithms for solving the associated optimization problems.
Tom has taught at many levels: undergraduate, masters, PhD, executive programs, and both in engineering and business schools. He has given short courses in optimization in Berlin, and in Padua and Rimini in Italy. Recently most of his teaching has been in the MBA Core course at UBC, where he taught Supply Chain Management and optimization as part of an interdisciplinary team. He also served as co-chair of the Core for two years. He won the UBC CGA Master Teaching Award for Graduate Teaching in 1996-97.
Tom was an organizer of the conference IPCO 1996 in Vancouver as well as a co-editor of its proceedings, a member of the program committee for IPCO 2007, was an Associate Editor of Mathematical Programming, and Co-Editor of a George Danzig memorial volume of Discrete Optimization. He served on committees for the SIAM Optimization Prize, INFORMS Optimization Prize, and the MPS Tucker Prize (twice, once as Chair). He has been a faculty advisor to several applied research projects through UBC's Centre for Operations Excellence (COE). Tom was awarded a UBC Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Faculty Research Fellowship in 1993-94 to support his sabbatical.
He has consulted on applied projects for several clients, including Xerox Webster Labs, BC Transit, BC Telephone, Avcorp (an aircraft parts manufacturer), Intel, and Methanex.
