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The Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) announced that Shabbir Ahmed, Anderson-Interface Chair and professor, and Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and professor, have been elected as 2017 Fellows by the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

As the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting best practices and advances in operations research, management science, and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making, and outcomes, INFORMS reserves the Fellow Award for distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments in operations research and the management sciences.  

In the announcement of the Fellow Awards, the organization recognized Ahmed for “exceptional contributions to stochastic and discrete optimization, dedicated service to the optimization community, and outstanding mentorship of future scholars.”

INFORMS commended Romeijn for “outstanding contributions in research to optimization, supply chain management, and healthcare, education, academic leadership, and service to INFORMS and the profession.” 

About Shabbir Ahmed 

Ahmed said, “I am very honored to be part of the distinguished scholars and practitioners selected as INFORMS Fellows this year. My sincere thanks to the colleagues who nominated me and the selection committee. I am particularly happy to share this honor with three other researchers in my area of stochastic optimization and, of course, with my ISyE colleague Edwin.”

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor in ISyE Ahmed is interested in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems and their applications in energy and other networked systems. His research in these areas has been supported by federal agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; as well as by industrial organizations such as ExxonMobil, IBM, and Samsung.

Ahmed has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-2010), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-2008). His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship from ISyE, and the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation award. He is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters, and was an area editor for Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science and a department editor for IISE Transactions (Operations Engineering and Analysis).

He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

About Edwin Romeijn

“It is a great honor to be recognized by the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) with the 2017 Fellow Award,” said Romeijn. “Together with my colleague Shabbir Ahmed, we join the ranks of many distinguished individuals who also have been recognized for their contributions to operations research and management sciences.

As the Stewart School Chair, Romeijn is responsible for overseeing ISyE as the nation’s largest industrial engineering program.

His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.

Romeijn is currently an associate editor of IISE Transactions. He is a member of INFORMS, Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). In April 2017, he was recognized by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) with the 2017 IISE Fellow Award, which recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering.

Romeijn received his M.S. in econometrics and Ph.D. in operations research from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1988 and 1992, respectively.