Congratulations to the 2022 INFORMS Board of Directors

Cornell professor elected secretary at INFORMS

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 5, 2021 – INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced Mark Lewis has been newly elected the secretary of INFORMS.  

Professor Lewis is a Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Engineering at Cornell University. He uses the methodology of stochastic dynamic programming or Markov decision processes to analyze problems in dynamic control of service systems. Professor Lewis has considered routing in transportation systems, control of inventory systems and allocation of inter-switch handoffs in wireless communications. Despite his versatility in the analysis of such systems his passion is for resource allocation in controlled queueing networks. He is a prominent member of INFORMS and was named a 2021 INFORMS Fellow.

University of Edinburgh professor elected Vice President-International at INFORMS

INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced Miguel Anjos has been named the vice president of International Activities at INFORMS. 

Anjos is chair of operational research at the University of Edinburgh, and Inria International chair. After earning degrees at McGill, Stanford and Waterloo, he was faculty member at Southampton, Waterloo, and Polytechnique Montreal, where he was Founding Academic Director of the Trottier Institute for Energy, before joining Edinburgh. 

He has served INFORMS for more than 15 years, notably as Vice-Chair of the Optimization Society, Selects member for the Analytics/Practice Conference, and Lead for creating the ENRE Young Researcher Prize. He is currently President of ENRE.  

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Robin Lougee elected Vice President of Practice at INFORMS

INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced Robin Lougee has been newly elected the vice president of Practice at INFORMS. 

Dr. Lougee is at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Prior to that she spent more than 25 years as a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. 

Lougee has played a key role in building INFORMS’ communities and meetings. She served on the INFORMS Board as vice president of Meetings for two years, following four years as a member of the Meetings Committee. She also drove the creation of the INFORMS Professional Colloquium for students. She received the 2016 INFORMS George E. Kimball Medal, which is awarded for recognition of distinguished service to the Institute and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. She was also awarded the INFORMS Impact Prize for COIN-OR.

Avista Senior Analyst elected vice president of Chapters/Fora at INFORMS

INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced Kathryn Walter has been newly elected the vice president of Chapters/Fora at INFORMS. 

Walter’s research focuses on supply chain optimization and business analytics. She is a former military officer who worked in monitoring and predicting the status of a large workforce with specializations in trend analyses of personnel data and creating data visualizations. Walter has leadership experience heading a search and rescue coordination team in a high-energy environment with life-saving results. 

Georgia Tech’s Beril Toktay re-elected to INFORMS Board for second term beginning January 1, 2022

INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced that L. Beril Toktay will serve the 2nd year of her two-year term on the board as vice president of Marketing, Outreach and Communication. Toktay is a professor in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  

Her primary research is in sustainable operations, closed-loop supply chains and supply chain management. Her work won her the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society’s 2015 Management Science Best Paper in Operations Management Award.

Toktay has served as an associate editor for several INFORMS journals and became a distinguished fellow of the MSOM Society in 2017.

South Carolina’s Pelin Pekgun re-elected to INFORMS Board for second term beginning January 1, 2022 

INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, announced that Pelin Pekgun will serve the 2nd year of her two-year term on the board as vice president of Membership and Professional Recognition.

Pekgun is an associate professor in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Before turning to academia, Pekgun worked in industry, leading the operations research team in North America at JDA Software’s Pricing and Revenue Management Group.

Her research focus is in supply chain management, pricing and revenue management, and the marketing/operations interface.

Pekgun is an active INFORMS member, serving as chair on several committees. She currently serves as an associate editor for two of the 17 journals published by INFORMS. Pekgun has also been a finalist for several of the Institute’s top awards.   

About INFORMS 

With more than 12,000 members from around the world, INFORMS is the largest association for the decision and data sciences, made up of professionals and students. INFORMS members support organizations and governments at all levels as they work to transform data into information, and information into insights that lead to more efficient, effective, equitable and impactful results. 

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Contact:

Ashley Smith

443-757-3578

[email protected]