This new professorship recognizes department excellence and honors U-M IOE Professor Emeritus, Katta G. Murty who has been a part of the Department for over 50 years.
On May 15, 2025, the University of Michigan (U-M) Board of Regents approved the appointment of Uday V. Shanbhag as the first Katta G. Murty Collegiate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering. This new professorship recognizes department excellence and honors U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) Professor Emeritus, Katta G. Murty.
“I am honored to receive the Katta G. Murty Collegiate Professorship of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan,” said Shanbhag. “It will help me support the mentorship of graduate students in the fields of optimization and game theory and allow me to build new collaborations with my colleagues. I feel privileged to be part of a community that emphasizes this high level of scholarship, commitment to teaching and mentorship of students.”
Shanbhag joined U-M IOE in 2024 after serving as the Gary and Sheila Bello Chair at Pennsylvania State’s Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering department. His research focuses on developing analytical and computational methods for optimization, variational and game-theoretic problems involving nonsmoothness, nonconvexity, stochasticity and hierarchy. His work has been applied to power systems and markets, with recent advances impacting statistical learning.
“Dr. Murty has been a remarkably influential scholar, and his work has both defined multiple facets of optimization theory and influenced a breadth of research threads, said Shanbhag. “My research in the field of variational inequality problems and complementarity theory has drawn much inspiration from Dr. Murty’s contributions to the field.”
In addition to his research, he has received many national honors, including a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in Operations Research, co-recipient of Best Paper Prizes from Computational Optimization and Applications and the Winter Simulation Conference, and the A.W. Tucker Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society.
Shanbhag also serves on the editorial boards of leading journals such as the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Optimization and Computational Optimization and Applications, having been a past associate editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Automatic Control.
The professorship was established in 2025 to honor the academic legacy of Dr. Murty. A longtime member of the U-M IOE faculty, Murty has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in linear, integer and nonlinear programming, as well as network flows.
Throughout his career, he has focused on practical impact through his research, as shown through his work in the fields of transportation, supply-chain operations and crude oil refining. His methodological research has spanned linear and nonlinear programming, combinatorial optimization and complementarity theory. A subset of his influential papers includes early algorithmic approaches to the “Traveling Salesman Problem”, complexity analysis in nonlinear optimization, and the study of complementarity problems, a challenging subclass of mathematical programming.
In addition to his research, Murty is the author of six books that span linear and nonlinear programming, combinatorial optimization, network flows and complementarity theory. He is particularly known for a foundational text in the field of complementarity theory, a subfield that subsumes a breadth of problems in optimization theory and equilibrium analysis. He also helped define the U-M IOE curriculum during his many years of service to the Department.
He has also been honored throughout his career with a variety of awards. This includes the Koopman Prize, an Edelman Award Finalist recipient and the ASEE Meriam/Wiley Distinguished Author Award. He was also elected as an INFORMS Fellow in 2003. He also give back to the Department every year with the Murty Paper Prize, a yearly prize given to an IOE student who writes the best student paper in the field of optimization.