Retsef Levi, Ph.D. '05

When Retsef Levi applied to graduate schools after almost 12 years in the Israeli army and a stint with a high-tech firm in Tel Aviv, he chose Cornell because of the close-knit community in ORIE and the efforts made to accommodate him as an older student with a wife and two children (a third child was born in Ithaca). He hasn’t regretted it. “The department here is one of the most challenging and exciting places I’ve seen: so broad, so stimulating intellectually,” Levi says. “Not only are all the resources there for you, but there is a lot of willingness to share, to teach, to support.”

Levi’s work applies optimization theory to problems in supply chain and inventory management; for example, addressing the problems that occur when demand for a commodity is extremely volatile. Recognizing that searching for a perfect solution would require more computing effort than is practical, he has focused on finding fast, feasible ways to construct near-perfect solutions. Levi has found this combination of the theory and the practical to be typical of the way OR is approached at Cornell. “There are an infinite number of opportunities in every direction you can think of, from the very theoretical and most abstract work to the most practical and implementable work. And if you want to combine them, you can also do that here.”

Levi has accepted the one-year Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Math Sciences in the IBM Watson Research Center. Then he will take up a tenure-track position at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He says his whole family will miss Ithaca. “It has so much nature around, more entertainment than you’d expect, and the people are very nice and friendly. I have only good things to say about this place.”