David S. Hirshfeld

TIMS President, 1979-80

 

David Hirshfeld was the 26th President of TIMS. His efforts as President focused on increasing the visibility and role of the practitioner community in TIMS.

Before becoming TIMS President, he was a member of the TIMS Council. He is a Fellow of INFORMS. He was the founding Vice Chairman and later Chairman of the TIMS College on the Practice of Management Science (CPMS), a co-founder of the Edelman Prize for achievement in management science practice, and chairman of the Edelman prize competition committee for several years.

Mr. Hirshfeld is the co-founder and President of MathPro Inc., a consulting firm in Bethesda, MD specializing in technical and economic analysis of petroleum refining operations. MathPro’s clients include federal and state government agencies, industry associations, oil refining companies, automobile manufacturers, and professional services firms.

Mr. Hirshfeld, a Chemical Engineer by training, specializes in analyzing the interactions between clean fuels regulations, developments in refining technology, the economics of oil refining, and the economics of alternative fuels. He has analyzed the economics of the oil refining sectors and of individual refineries in the United States, Canada, South America, Japan, and Europe. He has also analyzed the economic and energy implications of renewable fuels production and of policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. He built MathPro Inc.’s proprietary refinery modeling system, ARMS, and frequently has applied refinery LP modeling to assess costs and impacts in the refining industry of fuels regulations and government policies.

He started his professional career with Esso Research and Engineering Co. and later joined Orchard-Hays and Co., where he worked for one of the pioneers of mathematical programming, William Orchard-Hays. With Orchard-Hays and several associates, he was a co-founder of Management Science Systems (MSS), a mathematical programming software development and consulting firm. At MSS, he e formulated and guided implementation of profit-enhancing optimization models for operations planning and investment planning in the petroleum refining, forest products, container, and food and beverage industries. Subsequently, he served as Director of Strategic Planning at the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation, and then joined Sobotka & Company, a Washington consulting firm, where he ran the petroleum industry consulting practice for nine years, before establishing MathPro Inc. in 1990.

BChemEng, 1957, Rensselaer; MChemEng, 1959; Delaware; MS (Applied Math), Stevens Institute of Technology, 1964.