January 2019

Ramayya Krishnan, Shane Henderson, David Shmoys, Alina Sorescu

Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Texas A&M University

Ramayya Krishnan’s research has focused on the development of decision support tools to analyze, interpret, and act on consumer and social behavior in digital and networked platforms. His early work resulted in methods used by government agencies such as the Census Bureau to balance the competing needs to release data to generate economic value while protecting privacy and confidentiality. With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, he developed novel approaches to gather and analyze data from e-commerce platforms. mobile telephony networks, and peer-to-peer networks. These networks and platforms, when used as testbeds, enabled study of questions related to pricing, consumer search, consumption, and competition in online markets. This work led to actionable policy insights about pricing in online markets as well as approaches to fostering and policing technology-mediated communities that form on mobile and Internet platforms. More recently, he has focused on how sensing and learning are transforming decision making by workers in gig economy platforms. A distinctive feature of his work has been deep partnerships with firms or agencies and pursuit of work that has made foundational contributions to management science and information technology while making a real-world impact.

Shane G. Henderson holds the Charles W. Lake, Jr. Chair in Productivity in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell University. His research interests include discrete-event simulation, simulation optimization, emergency services planning and transportation. He is the editor in chief of the open-access journal Stochastic Systems. He is an INFORMS Fellow and a co-recipient of the INFORMS Wagner Prize for his work on bike-sharing programs. He has served as Director of the School of ORIE, as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and as simulation area editor for Operations Research. He has previously held positions in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. He likes cats, climbing walls, biking, Harry Potter and being a Dad.

David Shmoys obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, and held postdoctoral positions at MSRI in Berkeley and Harvard University, and a faculty position at MIT before joining the Cornell faculty. He was the Chair of the Provost’s “radical collaboration” task force on data science and Associate Director of the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell University.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, INFORMS, and of SIAM, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and has served on numerous editorial boards, including Operations Research (for which he is currently co-Area Editor for Optimization), Mathematics of Operations Research (for which he is currently an Associate Editor), ORSA Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming, Research in the Mathematical Sciences, and the SIAM Journals of both Computing and Discrete Mathematics, where for the latter he also served as Editor-in-Chief. He has been the advisor for 27 graduated Ph.D. students, and his former students are currently on the faculties of many leading universities and research labs, including MIT, Waterloo, Brown, Maryland, Georgetown, and D-Wave.

Shmoys’ research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, and most recently, comptuational sustainability. His work has highlighted the central role that linear programming plays in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems; his recent book, co-authored with David Williamson, The Design of Approximation Algorithms, was awarded the 2013 Lanchester Prize by INFORMS. His paper, “Analytics and Bikes: Riding Tandem with Motivate to Improve Mobility”, joint with Daniel Freund, Shane Henderson, and Eoin O’Mahony, was awarded the 2018 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize. He has been working on data-driven models in a broad cross-section of areas, including COVID epidemiological modeling, congressional districting and IoT network design.

Alina Sorescu is Professor of Marketing, Chancellor EDGES Fellow, holder of the Paula and Steve Letbetter’ 70 Chair in Business, and Director of the Ph.D. in Business Administration Program – Marketing at the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from University of Bucharest, a MS from University of Florida and Ph.D. from University of Houston. Her research focuses on business models, product portfolio decisions, branding, acquisitions and alliances, and measuring the financial value of marketing actions. Her research appears in journals such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing and others. Alina is the coeditor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing and has served as an Associate Editor or an ERB member at the Journal of Marketing, where she was twice recognized with the best reviewer award, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Her research awards include the Ricky W. Griffin Outstanding Research Achievement Award, the Strategic Management Society conference on Big Bang Innovation Best Proposal Award, the AMA John A. Howard Dissertation Award, the AMS Mary Kay Dissertation Award, the AMA Winter Conference Best Paper in the Marketing and Technology track, as well as multiple MSI research grants. Her research has also been selected as a finalist for the Paul Green Award for the best article published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Her teaching awards include the Montague Center for Teaching Excellence Scholar Award and the Association of Former Students Distinguished Teaching Award at the college and university level.