INFORMS News: Doing Good With Good O.R. Student Competition

Winner Jonathan Turner (fourth from left) and other finalists in the Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition.

Jonathan Turner, a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, won the INFORMS Doing Good with Good O.R. Student Competition with his project, “Improving the Educational Outcomes of Future Surgeons.” The competitions’ co-chairs, James Cochran and John Fowler, announced the results at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

The competition is designed to identify and honor outstanding projects in the field of operations research and the management sciences conducted by a student or student group that have a significant societal impact. The projects must have, or are likely to have, a significant societal impact, and operations research and management science methods and tools (broadly interpreted) must be central to the success of the projects described. “Societal impact” should be construed to mean an impact on individuals, communities and organizations that goes beyond that associated with a private-sector for-profit initiative. The projects might also strive to include innovation through theory, creative computational methods, and should address implementation challenges.

Other finalists included Carleton Coffrin (Brown University), Justin Henriques (University of Virginia), Greg Werker (University of British Columbia), Dani Slaton (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Jingyu Zhang (North Carolina State University).