The first SPPSN best paper competition took place in the months leading up to the INFORMS 2011 national conference in Charlotte. There were 15 submissions and five finalists. The awardees were:

First place

Carri W. Chan, Linda V. Green, Yina Lu, Nicole Leahy and Roger Yurt, “Triage of Burn-Injured Patients in a Catastrophic Scenario”

Second place

Muer Yang, Theodore T. Allen, Michael J. Fry and W. David Kelton, “Using Operations Research to Improve Voting Systems”

Finalists

Morgan Doty, Bryce Dykes, Kathleen Hendrix, Ralph Long, Dana Lupuloff, Doug Meagh, Jeffrey Phillips, Julie Swann and Michael Vallecoccia, “Gwinnett County Public Schools: OR/MS Drives Improvements in Bus Logistics”

Jessica L. Heier Stamm, Nicoleta Serban and Julie Swann, “Quantifying and Explaining Access to H1N1 Vaccine”

Awards were presented at the SPPSN business meeting at INFORMS Charlotte. The judging committee was:

• Michael Johnson, University of Massachusetts Boston, SPPSN president and committee chair
• Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern University
• John Hall, National Fire Protection Association
• Vicki Sauter, University of Missouri – St. Louis

Julie Ivy, North Carolina State University