William Cook is a professor in Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, where he received his Ph.D. in 1983. Bill was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2009, an INFORMS Fellow in 2010, a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, and an American Mathematics Society Fellow in 2012. Together with David Applegate, Robert Bixby, and Vasek Chvatal, he was awarded the 2007 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS for the book The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study. Bill is a former Editor-in-Chief of the journals Mathematical Programming (Series A and B) and Mathematical Programming Computation. He is the chairman of the Mathematical Optimization Society and a past chairman of the INFORMS Computing Society.