Richard Larson
Richard Larson received a BS (1965), a SM (1967), and a Ph.D. (1969) from MIT where he is currently a Professor of both Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Larson has served as Co-Director of the MIT Operations Research Centre (over 14 years in that post) and PI of several of MIT's most ambitious technology-enabled learning programs. Recently, he held the first-ever meeting of LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium), an international outreach project that he is building with emphasis on bringing quality tertiary education to developing countries via advanced technologies. He is the founding co-director of the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. Dr. Larson is the co-author, with Amedeo Odoni, of Urban Operations Research (Prentice Hall, 1981) and author of the book Urban Police Patrol Analysis, which was awarded the 1972 Lanchester Prize of ORSA. He is the author, co-author or editor of five other books and author of over 75 scientific articles, primarily in the fields of technology-enabled education, urban service systems, queueing, logistics and workforce planning. Dr. Larson is the originator of the Hypercube Queueing Model and the Queue Inference Engine (QIE).
He has served as a consultant to Coca-Cola, Johnson Controls, EDS, United Artists Cinemas, Union Carbide Corporation, Rand, Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science, Predictive Networks, WebCT, Hibernia College, Hong Kong University, the World Bank and the U.S. Department of Justice. With Structured Decisions Corporation, Dr. Larson has undertaken major projects with Citibank, American Airlines, Actmedia, the U.S. Postal Service, New York City, Jenny Craig, Conagra, Diebold, and BOC. His research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques (e.g., the Queue Inference Engine), but has also been covered in national media. He has been an invited lecturer internationally in such countries as China, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea, India, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Algeria, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela and Chile. Has been a Visiting Professor at U.C. Berkeley IE/OR, Technical University of Denmark and Hong Kong University.
His activities with INFORMS, ORSA, and TIMS include General Chairman of the TIMS/ORSA National Meeting Boston (1995), President of ORSA (1993-4), founding Director of INFORMS (1994), honorary member of Omega Rho, Philip M. Morse Lecturer (1997-99), and recipient of the George E. Kimball Medal (2002).
