Dr. Lewis Ntaimo, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, and former Ph.D. student, Tanisha Cotton, were awarded second place in the Institution for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Minority Issues Forum (MIF) inaugural paper competition.
“This award is a very big recognition in the operations research field,” Ntaimo said. “Tanisha worked very hard creating new models and algorithms to help in decision making, while taking into account unknown or stochastic risks.”
This award is for their paper, “A computational study of mean-risk stochastic linear programming.” This work was published in the Mathematical Programming Computation journal last year.
“Tanisha’s work has been applied to different applications including managing air traffic in the military when supplies need to be delivered,” Ntaimo said. “Weather and conditions on the ground are constantly changing and very unpredictable. The algorithms developed in this work makes it possible for the deliveries to be made at the best time, taking into account all unpredictable risks. The work can also be applied in the energy and power planning industry.”
When Cotton completed her Ph.D. in 2014, she began working with the Veteran’s Affair’s office and is now seeking opportunities to return to the academic and research setting.
The award was presented at 2016 INFORMS annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion brought together both collaborators.
INFORMS is a national organization and the largest of its kind in the world for professionals in the operations research, management science and analytics fields. Texas A&M is also home to an active student chapter that was recently awarded the annual student chapter award at the cum laude level.