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ORIE Wins Big - INFORMS 2020

The 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting was presented and attended, for the very first time, entirely in a virtual format, prioritizing the health and safety of those attending. The current pandemic did little to slow down the impact of faculty and students who once again continue to rack up accolade after accolade. Below, is a list of the awards/recognitions members of our department received this year. Congratulations to all!

  • Adrian Lewis, The Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, won the John von Neuman prize, awarded for a body of work, with fundamental, sustained contributions to theory in operations research and the management sciences. Adrian will receive $5000, a medallion and a citation for his contribution that has stood the test of time.
  • Wes Gurnee '20, founder and Executive Director of Fairmandering, won the INFORMS Undergraduate Research Prize, the top prize given to undergraduates at the INFORMS annual meeting, for the joint paper with David Shmoys, “Fairmandering: A Column Generation Heuristic for Fairness-Optimized Political Redistricting”. A YouTube link of Mr. Gurnee’s video presentation of the work can be seen, here.
  • Bhavik Shah ’19 (Finalist)—INFORMS Undergraduate Research Prize for “Mixed Integer Linear Programming Under Preference Uncertainty”
  • Tiandong Wang, Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, (Runner-Up)—2020 Doctoral Dissertation Award for Operations Research in Telecommunications and Network Analytics, recognizing outstanding scholarly achievements of young people in the field, for the PhD thesis “Heavy Tail Phenomena in Preferential Attachment Networks”—ORIE 2019, advisor Sid Resnick. Dr. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University.
  • Nikhil Garg, joining Cornell Tech as an assistant professor in July 2021, was awarded the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award, established to encourage academic research combining theory and practice and given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice for his thesis “Designing Marketplaces and Civic Engagement Platforms: Learning, Incentives, and Pricing”. Nikhil will be given a monetary award of $800 for first place.
  • Omar El Housni, visiting assistant professor at Cornell Tech, received second place in the 2020 George Nicholson student paper competition, awarded to identify and honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences, for the paper "On the Optimality of Affine Policies in Dynamic Robust Optimization”.

Below, is a list of the awards/recognitions members of our department received at the INFORMS conference or through a recent Google sponsored event.

  • Qiaomin Xie, visiting assistant professor with ORIE, was awarded a Research Award from the Google’s Systems and Infrastructure Group. The award comes with an unrestricted gift of $10,000. Amazingly, there was no application process for this award. It was purely on excellent research contributions in the areas of the control of queueing networks and reinforcement learning.

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