INFORMS News: Bean, Wein receive Kimball Medals

INFORMS President Susan Albin (far left) and committee member John Birge (far right) flank Kimball Medal recipients James Bean and Lawrence Wein.

James C. Bean, senior vice president and provost at the University of Oregon, and Lawrence Wein, professor of management science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, received the 2010 George E. Kimball Medal for distinguished service to INFORMS and the O.R. profession. Committee member John Birge presented the medals at the 2010 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Following are excerpts from the citations:

James C. Bean: Bean’s research is in the theory and application of infinite horizon optimization, Markov decision processes and genetic algorithms to problems in resource allocation, scheduling and production control. His most visible work has been development of the random keys encoding for applying genetic algorithms to complex sequencing problems and foundational work on existence of forecasting horizons with Robert Smith.

He was an associate editor of Management Science. Bean has worked on various industrial projects with companies such as General Cable (production control), Penford Products (production scheduling), Homart Development (divestiture scheduling), General Motors (scheduling and equipment replacement/capacity planning), Michigan Consolidated Gas Company and IBM (equipment replacement), Bethlehem Steel (capacity planning) and Tektronix (forecasting).

Within INFORMS and its heritage organizations, Bean served as editor of the ORSA/TIMS Annual Comprehensive Index, the first electronic publication of the organizations, ORSA Council member, chair of the Joint ORSA/TIMS Information Technology Committee and inaugural vice president for Information Technology of INFORMS. During this period he helped design the initial version of INFORMS Online and recommended Mike Trick as its first editor in chief.

He was later secretary of INFORMS and president (2001). During his term as president, INFORMS reorganized the Board into its current format, reducing its size by nearly half, designed the Fellows Award Program and established broad electronic access to INFORMS publications.

Early in his career Bean was selected as Outstanding Teacher in Industrial and Operations Engineering at Michigan seven times. He led a Homart Development/University of Michigan team to runner-up in the Edelman Prize competition in 1986, and was named to the Fellows Award in its inaugural year. He was appointed by the president of MIT to two terms on the Corporation Visiting Committee for Engineering Systems, and by the Governor of Oregon to the state’s Innovation Council.
Lawrence M. Wein: Professor Wein’s early research used heavy traffic asymptotics to solve dynamic scheduling problems in queueing networks. Some of this work led a workload regulating job release policy that was widely implemented in the U.S. semiconductor industry. In the mid-1990s, Wein switched his attention to problems in health care and medicine, including managing the national waiting list for kidney transplants, analyzing and optimizing treatments for HIV, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and selecting annual influenza vaccine strains. Some of his HIV work led to successful clinical trials for switching drug therapies.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Wein focused his research on preventing and mitigating catastrophic homeland security threats. His work in this area, via briefings in Washington D.C., Congressional testimony, papers in top scientific journals and op-eds in major newspapers, has influenced a variety of government policies, including a post-attack mass vaccination policy for smallpox, a 2009 Presidential Directive authorizing the U.S. Postal Service to dispense antibiotics after an anthrax attack, the intensification of the heat pasteurization process for milk to preempt a botulinum toxin attack, the switch from a two-finger to a 10-finger system in the US-VISIT program, the proposed use and FDA approval of N95 respirators for pandemic influenza, and the civilian sheltering strategy in the event of a terrorist detonation of an improvised nuclear device.

He was on the Homeland Security Advisory Group for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Election Campaign and in 2009 was on the advisory board for the Department of Homeland Security’s first quadrennial review.

Wein was editor in chief of Operations Research from 2000-2005, and edited a 50th anniversary issue that includes 33 articles by some of the field’s seminal figures. He was also chair of the Applied Probability Special Interest Group when it became an INFORMS Society.

Wein is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of INFORMS and the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society. From INFORMS and its societies, he has received the Lanchester Prize, the Morse Lectureship, the President’s Award, the Expository Writing Award, the Koopman Prize and the Erlang Prize.