Peter Kolesar is Professor Emeritus at the Columbia University, the Research Director of Columbia’s Deming Center for Quality and Productivity Management and a member of the Water Center of Columbia’s Earth Institute.
Professor Kolesar’s research spans many areas of operations research and operations management and has been applied in many diverse areas including: the deployment of police and fire fighting resources, industrial quality control, diagnosis of glaucoma, industrial production planning, telephone call centers and counter IED warfare. His design of the FDNY’s computerized fire engine relocation algorithm, which was used to great benefit during the 9/11 World Trade Center crisis won him and his partners international awards. His work on police patrol car allocation has been employed in cites around the US. Over the last decade, much of Peter Kolesar’s research has been on increasing the effectiveness of quality and productivity management in US industry. He been twice been an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals and has been a longtime consultant to industry and government. He is currently working with the Pentagon and the USMC on counter IED warfare in Afghanistan.
His interest in preserving the aquatic environment of the upper Delaware River led him to form a coalition of conservation organizations and carry out the mathematical research that led to the implementation in 2007 of the Flexible Flow Management Program for controlling water releases into the Delaware from New York City’s reservoirs on the Delaware’s headwaters.
The author of more than 50 scientific papers, Peter Kolesar is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.
Peter is married with three children. He lives in Manhattan and in the Catskills, is an avid fly fisherman and plays classical and flamenco guitar. As an undergraduate, he captained the Queens College and Columbia water polo teams and was three times all conference center forward.
