From vision to reality with the 2026 INFORMS President

Published: May 27, 2026

Earlier this year, we kicked off 2026 with INFORMS President Mark Lewis, talking about his vision for the year ahead.

Now, just after the INFORMS Analytics+ Conference – his first major event as president – we’re checking back in to reflect on what we’ve seen so far, what stood out, and what’s still ahead for the INFORMS community.

I'm starting to see people either, let's say adopt or appreciate the INFORMS Analytics Framework. It's starting to codify itself in the land of decision-making, which is really nice to see. I think that data-rich environment that we're living in now, and it's even accelerating, we're going to really need to be smart and excited about how we make decisions, how we use data, how we remind ourselves what data has been used so far, and what we can do with the incoming bits of data. So, I do think that the OR/MS community has a huge place to have an influence there.

Interviewed this episode:

Mark Lewis

2026 INFORMS President

Mark E. Lewis is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Engineering at Cornell University and is the first African American elected as INFORMS president-elect.

Lewis has served INFORMS in numerous other capacities, including co-founder and president (twice) of the organization’s Minority Issues Forum. He is a past chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society and has served on several other INFORMS committees. Lewis has also earned multiple INFORMS awards and honors for his tireless service and extensive contributions to INFORMS, including being named to the inaugural class of the INFORMS Minority Issues Forum fellows.

Professionally, Lewis’ research and expertise is primarily in the dynamic control of service systems. He applies his work in routing to transportation systems, control of inventory systems and allocation of interswitch handoffs in wireless communication. He is also passionate about solving general problems in resource allocation. During his current sabbatical from the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell, Professor Lewis is working as an Amazon Scholar on pricing and logistics.