INFORMS President, 2010
Susan L. Albin was the 16th President of INFORMS. She is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rutgers University. Prior to joining Rutgers she was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories and a research associate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Her areas of research are quality engineering, multivariate process monitoring and control, multivariate statistics, data mining and stochastic modeling in data rich manufacturing environments. Her work has been applied in areas including medical device manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing and electronics assembly, food processing, advanced display technology, and plastics recycling. Professor Albin's research has been supported by NSF, FAA, DOD, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, and numerous industrial partners.
Professor Albin has been active member of INFORMS since 1981. She served as INFORMS Secretary and as a member of the ORSA Board of Directors. She was a founder of the INFORMS section on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability and chaired the first of its Advisory Councils. She was also a founding member of WORMS, Women in OR/MS. She has been a member of the Publications committee, served on search committees for editors of INFORMS journals, and was an Associate Editor for Management Science. When she has served on the meetings committee she promoted the idea of “meeting within a meeting.” She also served as cluster chair for topics in Quality Engineering, on prize committees, and has given talks in the Doctoral colloquium. She was a member of the subcommittee that introduced the INFORMS Society and worked on representation for INFORMS subdivisions.
Professor Albin is the Editor-in-Chief of IIE Transactions, the flagship journal of the Industrial Engineering profession. She has served as Focus Issue Editor of IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering.
As a visiting professor at Peninsula Technikon in South Africa, Professor Albin helped to establish a degree program in Quality Engineering that now has over 200 students who apply their knowledge in a variety of industries including textiles, construction, food processing, printing, automotive assembly, health care, and tourism.
Professor Albin is a Fellow of IIE, the Institute of Industrial Engineers. She received the Excellence in Teaching Award, School of Engineering, Rutgers University and the Exxon Education Foundation Award. She has delivered keynote speeches at conferences in China and Brazil. She is the winner of two best paper awards from IIE Transactions.
As president of INFORMS, she is most proud of the work of the Board in formulating INFORMS future with new sources of revenue and a more fact based budgeting system. During her tenure the Board set the stage for expanding INFORMS to serve the analytics community with services and products.
BS (Industrial Engineering) 1971, MS (Industrial Engineering) 1973, NYU; PhD (Operations Research and Industrial Engineering) 1981, Columbia.