INFORMS President, 2015
L. Robin Keller, was the 21st President of INFORMS. She is a professor in operations and decision technologies at the Paul Merage School of Business of the University of California, Irvine, having joined UCI in 1982 upon graduation from UCLA. At UCI she served as the Doctoral Program Director and Associate Dean (for the Full-time MBA Program and for Research). Her decision analysis research spans the areas of decision problem structuring, multiple attribute decision making, fairness, perceived risk, medical decision analysis, and planning protection against terrorism, environmental, health, and safety risks.
During her term as INFORMS President, Dr. Keller aimed to be an Ambassador for Operations Research and Analytics, via member outreach and outreach to our profession in general. In addition to the traditional President’s Desk bimonthly column in OR/MS Today, she posted monthly President’s Picks of articles from INFORMS journals to the Open Forum on INFORMS Connect. She worked to strengthen global connections with trips to Havana, Cuba (the 2015 11th International Workshop and the 2016 12th International Conference on Operations Research), Montreal, Canada (2015 CORS/INFORMS International Conference), Glasgow, Scotland (27th European Conference on Operational Research, EURO 2015) and the Systems Analysis 2015 Conference at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
Along with Craig Kirkwood, Dr. Keller wrote “The Founding of INFORMS: A Decision Analysis Perspective," in Operations Research (1999) about the Cost-Benefit Committee she chaired in planning for the merger of the Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA). She was the Editor-in-Chief of Decision Analysis, a founding Director-at-large of INFORMS, TIMS Vice President-Finance and Council member, and Decision Analysis Society Chair.
Prof. Keller served as a member of committees authoring National Academies Press books on performance-based safety regulation for the Transportation Research Board (2016-17), A Risk-Characterization Framework for Decision-Making at the Food and Drug Administration (2011) and Distribution and Administration of Potassium Iodide in the Event of a Nuclear Incident (2004); as a Program Director for the NSF Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program; as a U. S. National Committee member for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis; and as a Scientific Advisory Committee member for the USC CREATE Homeland Security Center.
Among Prof. Keller's honors are the 2015 Ramsey Medal for lifetime contributions to decision analysis from the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS, INFORMS Fellow (2004), and the George E. Kimball Medal (2006).
PROFESSIONAL HONORS AND AWARDS
EDUCATION:
B.A. (mathematics), 1974; M.B.A. and Ph.D. (management science), 1976 and 1982, UCLA