John J. Jarvis

ORSA President, 1992

John Jarvis was the 41st President of ORSA. He is the retired H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he was a member of the faculty for 36 years. John joined the faculty at the Georgia Tech immediately after receiving his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. He advanced through the ranks to become Chair of what has become the largest such program in the country, and is generally recognized as one of the premier academic programs in the discipline.

Professor Jarvis’ professional interests include logistics, networks and linear programming. He authored and co-authored numerous articles, technical reports, and presentations. His text, Linear Programming and Network Flows (1977), coauthored with Mokhtar S. Bazaraa and Hanif D. Sherali, is in its fourth edition. He was co-Principal of CAPS Logistics with H. Donald Ratliff and Frank H. Cullen. CAPS Logistics grew to a 150-person software firm, providing logistics solutions to Fortune 500 companies, before it was acquired by one of the large enterprise resource planning firms.

Dr. Jarvis held many leadership positions in the Society, including Program Chair of the 1977 Atlanta ORSA/TIMS meeting, Chair of the Combined Meetings Committee, Secretary of TIMS, and President of ORSA. John also served on the select committee which conceived of combining ORSA and TIMS into INFORMS, and led the way to implementation by designing the operating principles and budgeting mechanism for the new entity, preparing a constitution, and generating the votes required to ensure creation of the new society. He is the recipient of the Kimball Medal and is a Fellow of both INFORMS and IIE.

John has also been active in other professional organizations. He was President of the Institute of Industrial Engineers. He served the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads since 1992 in a variety of positions culminating in his service as Chair of this group in 1995.

Dr. Jarvis has had an outstanding career as an educator. He has conducted research in modeling and optimization of problems in the general area of transportation and logistics and has published numerous papers and given many presentations as a result of these efforts. In addition, John has applied his tremendous insights to practical problems that led to the formation of a company, CAPS, which has had significant success in solving difficult, large scale transportation and logistics problems.

BSIE, 1963, MSIE, 1965, PhD (Industrial Engineering), 1968, Johns Hopkins.