INFORMS President, 1996; TIMS President, 1987-1988; ORSA President, 1977-1978
Alfred Blumstein is one of only two persons (John D. C. Little was the other) to be President of all three societies. He was the 2nd President of INFORMS, the 34th President of TIMS, and the 26th President of ORSA. He is a University Professor and the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management of Carnegie Mellon University. He was director of the National Consortium on Violence Research (NCOVR), a major research project of the National Science Foundation from 1996 to 2006. From 1986 to 1993, he was Dean at the Heinz School.
Before joining the Heinz School in 1969, Professor Blumstein was at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he was Director of the Office of Urban Research and a member of the Research Council. In the mid-'60s, he was Director of the Science and Technology Task Force for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.
Prof. Blumstein was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Research on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice from its founding in 1975 until 1986. He served as chairman of that committee between 1979 and 1984, and also has chaired the committee's panels on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative Effects, Sentencing Research, and Research on Criminal Careers. He was a member of the Academy's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education from 1994 to 2000. Prof. Blumstein also served from 1979 to 1990 as chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the state's criminal justice planning agency, and as a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing from 1986 to 1996.
Prof. Blumstein was awarded the Kimball Medal in 1985 and ORSA’s President's Award in 1993 in recognition of his distinguished service to the society and the profession. He is a Fellow of INFORMS and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Blumstein was the 1987 recipient of the American Society of Criminology's Sutherland Award for contributions to research, and was the President of the Society in 1991-92. He was awarded the Wolfgang Award for Distinguished Achievement in Criminology in 1998.In 2007, he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.
During his service at ORSA, his major challenge was re-establishing the fiscal integrity of the organization. His time at TIMS focused heavily on enhancing the interactions between ORSA and TIMS. As the second president of INFORMS, he was responsible for addressing the many issues associated with integrating the two organizations and especially their business offices.
His research over the past forty years has covered many aspects of crime and the criminal-justice system, including crime measurement, modeling of criminal careers, sentencing, analysis of deterrence and incapacitation, prison populations, demographic trends, and drug-enforcement policy analysis.
BA (Engineering Physics) 1951, PhD (Operations Research) Cornell University 1960. LLD (hon.) John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York 1996