George E. Kimball Medal

Susan Albin received the Eng.Sc.D. degree in Operations Research from Columbia University and the BS and MS degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from NYU.  She is currently Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rutgers University and served as Graduate Director there for 14 years.  As a visiting professor in Mechanical Engineering 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 manufacturing, textiles, food processing, and tourism.  Before joining Rutgers, she worked at Bell Laboratories and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Prof. Albin’s areas of research are quality engineering, process monitoring and control, multivariate statistics, data mining and stochastic modeling. 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 industrial partners. Her research has appeared in journals including IIE Transactions, Operations Research, Management Science, and the Journal of Quality Technology.  Her work has been awarded Best Paper prizes from IIE Transactions and she has been a keynote speaker at international conferences.  She is the recipient of the Rutgers School of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award and the Exxon Education Foundation Award. Professor Albin is the Editor-in-Chief of IIE Transactions and has served as Focus Issue Editor of IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering and also as Associate Editor for Management Science.  Professor Albin is Fellow of IIE, the Institute of Industrial Engineers.

Professor Albin has been active member of INFORMS and its predecessors since 1981.  She was the 2010 President of INFORMS and has served as INFORMS Secretary and as a member of the ORSA Board of Directors.  As president of INFORMS, Professor Albin 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.  She was a founder of the INFORMS section on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability and chaired its first Advisory Council.  She was also a founding member of WORMS, Women in OR/MS.  Professor Albin has been a member of the Publications committee and served on search committees for editors of INFORMS journals.  She has served on the meetings committee where she promoted the idea of “meeting within a meeting.”  She has served on award committees including the Edelman Prize, the Wagner Prize, and the Dantzig Dissertation Prize, has given lectures at the Doctoral Colloquium, and served on the council of ORSA Technical Section on Applied Probability

For her contribution to the field of operations research and the management sciences and her distinguished service to INFORMS and its predecessors, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation by awarding the 2012 George E. Kimball Medal to Susan Albin

Don N. Kleinmuntz is Executive Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer at Strata Decision Technology, a leading provider of financial analytics software to the healthcare industry that he and his wife, Dr. Catherine Kleinmuntz, founded in 1996.  Previously, he served as the company’s CEO, CFO, and CIO.  Over the course of his career, he has been a passionate advocate for blending academic rigor with practical relevance, and is an acknowledged expert on decision and risk analysis, business analytics, and leveraging information technology to improve organizational decision making.  Don has collaborated in the design and implementation of budgeting and planning systems that are in use at close to 1,000 hospitals across the United States, including many large healthcare systems and sophisticated academic medical centers.  He has consulted to hospitals, a wide variety of companies and organizations, and several government agencies. 

Don Kleinmuntz’s business pursuits have followed a successful academic career.  Don holds a BA in Statistics and an MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.  He held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and USC.   Dr. Kleinmuntz published on a wide range of topics related to decision making, including fundamental and methodological research on cognitive processes in judgment and decision making, methods and approaches for improving decision making, and applied work on decision making models and processes for accounting, financial management, resource allocation, and risk management. 

Dr. Kleinmuntz is an INFORMS Fellow and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. In 2011 the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society awarded Dr. Kleinmuntz the Frank P. Ramsey Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Decision Analysis, an award that recognizes career contributions to the field in academia, business practice, or service to the profession, with the award committee citing notable contributions in all three areas.

An active and committed member of INFORMS, Don joined both TIMS and ORSA early in his career, and was active in the predecessor to the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS.  Don served as an officer of the Decision Analysis Society for four years, and as an officer on the INFORMS Board for a total of seven years, including serving as President in 2009 and four years as Treasurer.  He has served on many INFORMS committees, including long service on both the Finance and Investment Committees. As Treasurer, he helped to stabilize the organization’s finances. As President-Elect and President, Don worked to facilitate both international and academic-industry collaboration, and made pivotal contributions to a strategic planning process that led to a major new initiative in business analytics. He also was one of the inaugural Editors-in-Chief of the journal Decision Analysis, and an Associate Editor of Management Science.

For his many contributions to the field of operations research and management science, and for his distinguished service to INFORMS and its predecessor organizations, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation to Don N. Kleinmuntz by awarding him the 2012 George E. Kimball Medal.