Aharon Ben-Tal is a Professor of Operations Research and former Head of the MINERVA Optimization Center at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and holder of the Dresner Chair. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1973. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, University of Copenhagen, Delft University of Technology, MIT, CWI Amsterdam, Columbia and NYU. His interests are in Continuous Optimization, particularly nonsmooth and large-scale problems, conic and robust optimization, as well as convex and nonsmooth analysis. Recently the focus of his research is on optimization problems affected by uncertainty. In the last 15 years, he has devoted much effort to engineering applications of optimization methodology and computational schemes. Some of the algorithms developed in the MINERVA Optimization Center are in use by Industry (Medical Imaging, Aerospace). He has published more than 125 papers in professional journals and co-authored three books: Optimality in Nonlinear Programming: A Feasible Direction Approach (Wiley-Interscience, 1981) Lectures on Modern Convex Optimization: Analysis, Algorithms and Engineering Applications (SIAM-MPS series on optimization, 2001) and Robust Optimization (Princeton University press ,2009). Prof. Ben-Tal served two term as the Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. He served as a council member of the Mathematical Programming Society (1994-1997). He was Area Editor (Continuous Optimization) of Math. of Operations Research (1993-1999), member of the Editorial Board of SIAM J. Optimization, J. Convex Analysis, OR Letters, Mathematical Programming, Management Science, Math. Modeling and Numerical Analysis, European J. of Operations Research and Computational Management Science. From January 2012 he is the Area Editor (Optimization) for Operations Research. He gave numerous plenary and keynote lectures in international conferences.In 2007 Professor Ben-Tal was awarded the EURO Gold Medal - the highest distinction of Operations Research within Europe. In 2009 he was named Fellow of INFORMS. In 2010 he was awarded the status of Distinguished Scientist by CWI (center for mathematics and computer science, The Netherlands). In 2011 he received the IBM Faculty Award. As of January 2015 his citation count is 13,500 (google scholar).