Hugh E. Bradley

Brief Biography

Hugh E. Bradley served as the thirty-fourth president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and spent the majority of his career as an OR practitioner. Bradley received his bachelors and masters degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prior to taking a position with Sperry-Rand Corporation (an electronics company) in 1957. After three years as a research engineer at Sperry-Rand, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to continue graduate study. With George Nemhauser as his doctoral advisor, Bradley received his PhD in operations research and accepted a teaching job at the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. At Michigan he advised the dissertation of simulation pioneer Robert Sargent.

Bradley remained at Michigan for only four years prior to leaving for the professional sector. He first started work at The Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan as the Head of Operations Research. Over a twelve year tenure with the company, he moved up to Group Manager for Information Systems. During this period he also taught as an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University and Grand Valley State University. Bradley left Upjohn in 1979 to become Director of Corporate Information Systems for the Syntex Corporation in Palo Alto, California.

 After a series of other positions at various companies, Bradley became Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Shaklee Corporation, a manufacturer and distributor of natural supplements and household products. Bradley also held the position of Senior Vice President of Bear Creek Corporation (a Shaklee subsidiary) and was responsible for information systems management, development, and company operations.

A dedicated servant to the growth and development of operations research, Bradley has been an active member of multiple OR organizations including ORSA, The Institute for Management Science (TIMS), and the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). In addition to being ORSA’s treasurer for four years and thirty-fourth president, he has held various other positions including IFORS treasurer (1998 through 2006) and Vice President of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS). He served as the chief editor of International Abstracts in Operations Research (the official journal of IFORS)in the 1970s and edited Operations Research ’90 (1991), the critically acclaimed proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Operations Research.  

For his international presence and service to the discipline, Bradley was awarded the George E. Kimball Medal in 1990 and was elected a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in 2002.  He remains an active member in the OR community. Bradley continued to play a major role in the application of operations research as president of SIGMA Management Advisors from which he retired in 2006. In this position, Bradley worked as an advisor to company management on issues relating to information systems, project control, and operations research.

Other Biographies

INFORMS. Miser-Harris Presidential Gallery: Hugh E. Bradley. Accessed February 11, 2015. (link)