James B. Orlin, the Edward Pennell Brooks Professor of Operations Research at the Sloan School, has been named co-director of the Operations Research Center. He succeeds Professor Robert Freund, who will be returning to full-time teaching and research after his sabbatical. Professor Thomas Magnanti remains as the center's other co-director.
Professor Orlin has been on the MIT faculty since 1979 and has been head of the Management Science Area at Sloan since 1993. He holds the BA from the University of Pennsylvania (1974), the MA from Caltech (1976), the MMath from the University of Waterloo (1978) and the PhD from Stanford University (1981).
He is a noted researcher in the field of network flows and combinatorial optimization. In 1993, he received the Lanchester Prize for the best research in the field of operations research for his book Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications (Pren-tice Hall), which he co-authored with Professor Magnanti and Professor Ravi Ahuja. Professor Orlin is also interested in applications of networks and combinatorial optimization in vehicle routing and in logistics.
The Operations Research Center deals with the creation and application of scientific methods for decision-making. It draws on numerous disciplines including applied mathematics, computer science, economics, systems engineering and management.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 9, 1998.
