INFORMS Announces Three Finalist Universities for First UPS George D. Smith Prize Uniting Industry, Academia

Cornell, Lehigh, U of MI

HANOVER, MD, March 15, 2012 – The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) today announced three finalist schools in the competition for the first UPS George D. Smith Prize, an award created to strengthen ties between academia and industry. The award recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of analytics and operations research.

The finalists are:

• Cornell University, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering Master of Engineering Program. The leads for the Cornell team are Dr. Mark J. Eisner and Dr. Kathryn Caggiano.
• Lehigh University, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The lead for the Lehigh team is Dr. Aurélie Thiele.
• University of Michigan, Tauber Institute for Global Operations. The lead for the Tauber team is Dr. Lawrence M. Seiford, the Goff Smith Co-Director of the Tauber Institute for Global Operations

 In this inaugural year of the Smith Prize, a robust 18 schools applied to win the award.

The prize winner will be announced at a banquet taking place on Monday, April 16 in Huntington Beach, CA at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.

The UPS George D. Smith Prize is awarded to an academic department or program for effective and innovative preparation of students to be good practitioners of operations research, management science, or analytics. It is accompanied by a $10,000 cash award.

The establishment of the prize was announced by Randy Stashick, UPS’s global vice president of engineering, at the 2011 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.

The UPS George D. Smith Prize is named in honor of the late UPS Chief Executive Officer who was a patron of operations researchers at the leading Fortune 500 corporation. George D. Smith was the second CEO of UPS, holding the position form 1962-1972. He joined UPS as an accountant in 1925and at some point in his long and illustrious career held almost every functional title within the company.

More information about the prize is here.

About INFORMS

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. INFORMS serves the scientific and professional needs of operations research analysts, experts in analytics, consultants, scientists, students, educators, and managers, as well as their institutions, by publishing a variety of journals that describe the latest research in operations research, organizing academic and professional conferences, and providing a range of other services. INFORMS Online (IOL) is at www.informs.org. Further information about operations research can be found at www.scienceofbetter.org.

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