Past Awards
Dr. Keskinocak
The 2024 INFORMS George E. Kimball Medal is awarded to Professor Pinar Keskinocak to recognize her long, tireless, and visionary contributions to the operations research and management science profession, and her distinguished service to society and the INFORMS community.
Her pioneering work and leadership in health and humanitarian systems were instrumental in developing a community that is dedicated to having a positive impact on society. Her research and outreach during COVID-19 helped inform decisions and policies, and increased the global awareness of the impact of our professional community. She has served INFORMS in numerous positions, including as president in 2020, at the height of a global pandemic. Other significant contributions include co-founding the Public Sector Operations Research Section and the Junior Faculty Interest Group, empowering two communities which continue to thrive. She led the INFORMS effort to establish a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ambassadors program that provides a platform to members to lead or engage in a variety of DEI initiatives. She also provided leadership and strong support to Health Application Section and the Forum for Women in OR/MS. Her service and dedication are truly inspiring.
Dr. Shmoys
David Shmoys is the Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management and Leadership Studies, Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. David is one of our profession’s intellectual leaders, a superstar among us. His research addresses the design of approximation algorithms, combinatorial optimization, location theory, sequencing and scheduling theory, and network design, with applications that touch numerous facets of society. David’s list of recognitions is without parallel. He received the INFORMS Lanchester Prize, Khachiyan Prize, Daniel Wagner Prize, and the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) Test of Time award. David is also an INFORMS Fellow, with his published works cited more than 26,600 times. David’s professional service to INFORMS over many years is exemplary. He has often selflessly worked behind the scenes, humbly serving INFORMS and its membership in numerous critical roles and capacities. These include serving as committee chair for INFORMS Fellows, Lanchester, von Neumann, Farkas, Nicholson, and Khachiyan prizes. He has also held several senior editorial positions for Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, and Mathematics of Operations Research. With his contributions to operations research and his service to INFORMS, David has been a role model that every young INFORMS member can and should emulate. Indeed, his service to the profession is truly a blueprint for success. Given such a record of excellence, INFORMS expresses its sincere appreciation to David B. Shmoys by awarding him the 2024 George E. Kimball Medal.
The Lanchester Prize for 2013 is awarded to David Williamson and David Shmoys for their book,The Design of Approximation Algorithms, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011.
Solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems is of central importance to the field of operations research and the management science, in application domains ranging from network design to scheduling and routing to problems in computational graph theory. Approximation algorithms provide solutions to such problems that are simultaneously provably good and computationally efficient (solvable in polynomial time). This textbook provides a concise and systematic treatment of the major principles of approximation algorithm design, including greedy and local search, rounding data, dynamic programming, deterministic and random rounding of linear programs and semi-definite and primal-dual methods - highlighting the central role that linear and integer programming plays in both the design and analysis of approximation algorithms. This organization by technique rather than by problem area gives an innovative methodological unity to the subject, and the elegance of the authors’ exposition and analyses exemplify the highest traditions of our field.
The Committee members (Garrett van Ryzin, chair, Guillermo Gallego, Steve Gilbert, Martin Rieman, Richard Steinberg, Jan Van Mieghem) are pleased to designate David Williamson and David Shmoys as recipients of the 2013 Lanchester Prize.