The University of Michigan Industrial and Operations Engineering Department walked away with numerous awards, including an INFORMS Fellow Award for Amy Cohn and Magna Cum Laude status for the U-M INFORMS student chapter.
Members of our community attended the 2024 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting to present their research to the OR/MS community. This year the meeting was held in Seattle, Washington on October 20-23 with over six thousand members in attendance. As a program with a significant emphasis on OR/MS, we were proud to have over 20 faculty members and students there to represent the University of Michigan Industrial and Operations Engineering Department (U-M IOE).
Assistant Professor, Albert S. Berahas won the INFORMS Moving Spirit Award for Forums. As the name details, this award is given to those who have distinguished themselves as leaders in their forums. Berahas joined the U-M IOE faculty in 2020 and spearheaded a multitude of DEI initiatives for the department. His research interest focuses on designing, developing, analyzing and implementing algorithms for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems.
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Amy M. Cohn was named an INFORMS Fellow. The prestigious recognition was only given to 12 of the total 12k+ members. In order to be named an INFORMS Fellow you must have provided innovative contributions to the field of OR/MS while improving lives worldwide. Cohn’s research, primarily in aviation and healthcare has certainly earned her the title of Fellow alongside her titles as Chief Transformative Officer of Michigan Medicine and Faculty Director of the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS).
Stephen M. Pollock Collegiate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, Brian Denton was honored as one of three distinguished speakers by the Health Applications Society of INFORMS. He presented work done by himself and Ph.D. graduate Weiyu Li on the optimization of decision-making for cancer surveillance. This is part of his ongoing work using optimization models and data analytics to improve public health decisions.
Faculty members, Raed Al Kontar, Salar Fattahi, and Ph.D. student, Naichen Shi won the Data Mining Society Best General Paper Competition at INFORMS for their paper titled “Triple Component Matrix Factorization: Untangling Global, Local, and Noisy Components.”
The U-M IOE INFORMS Student Chapter won Magna Cum Laude status from the Institute. This prestigious honor is only given to the most competitive chapters for exuding academic excellence in the field of OR/MS.
Ph.D. student, Cheoljoon Jeong, was selected as one of four finalists in the Best Student Paper Competition of the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section of INFORMS.
Undergraduate student, Aubree Xia received the INFORMS Scholarship which gave her the ability to travel to the Annual Meeting.