UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Three Penn State industrial engineering graduate students, along with a recent industrial engineering alumnus, were named awardees of the prestigious Koopman Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Doctoral candidates Sharan Srinivas and Shisheng Cui, master’s student Thor Hanson, and 2016 alumnus Nathaniel Bastian were among seven authors who earned the recognition for their paper titled, “The AMEDD [U.S. Army Medical Department] uses goal programming to optimize workforce planning decisions.”
Awarded annually to recognize the outstanding publication in military operations research, the INFORMS Koopman Prize is named after Bernard Koopman, a founding father of military operations research.
The problem presented in the team’s paper started as a class group project for the Multi-Criteria Optimization class taught by Professor A. Ravindran. Later, the Penn Staters worked to explore the problem by collaborating with staff at the U.S. AMEDD and subsequently published the paper in the INFORMS Interfaces journal.
The other co-authors and awardees are: Pat McMurry, AMEDD personnel proponency directorate at the U.S. Army Medical Department Center; Lawrence Fulton, assistant professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University; and Paul Griffin, Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Plaques were presented to the recipients at the INFORMS annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, in November.
More information about the Koopman Prize and a list of past recipients can be found on the INFORMS website.
INFORMS is an industry professionals’ network organization serving analytics professionals and operations researchers worldwide. Members include educators, scientists, students, managers, analysts and consultants. It is the largest society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research, management science and analytics.