INFORMS President, 2011
Rina Schneur was the 17th president of Informs. She has been a Director of the Business Analytics Group at Verizon Network and Technology since 2005. Prior to that, she was a Principal at Verizon and GTE Research and Technology. Before joining Verizon, Rina was an O.R. senior manager at Sabre Technologies. Rina did her Post Doctoral work at the IBM Watson Research Center.
In her career, Dr. Schneur has focused on applying operations research and analytics methodologies to industry problems in the areas of logistics, supply chain, network planning, telecommunication, sourcing and auctions. At Verizon she has also worked on developing solutions in capital management, marketing, performance, and operational efficiencies. She served on Verizon’s energy board of directors, which was established to streamline energy consumption and explore green energy options.
Rina Schneur co-founded Emptoris Inc. in 1999 and served on its advisory board for ten years. Dr. Schneur’s advisory role centered around the development of Emptoris’ unique analytics solutions of it sourcing and procurement platform. The company has grown to hundreds of employees and customers around the world. It was bought by IBM in 2011.
Dr. Schneur has been a member of INFORMS since her graduate school days. She became an active member in 2000 when the first council for developing the then-new INFORMS spring practice conference (today the INFORMS analytics conference) was formed. She served on the advisory council for the first four years of the conference and chaired it in 2004. She joined the meetings committee in 2001 and after serving for four years was elected Vice President of meetings, a role she held from 2005 through 2008, during the time that annual meeting attendance grew to over 4000 a year.
In her president role Rina Schneur focused on establishing a strategic planning process that is coordinated with a revised budget process; together they helped transform INFORMS into a forward-thinking organization. She led the board in its commitment to pursue involvement in analytics and explore and develop a plan for INFORMS to become a prominent player in the field. She specifically reached out to government and non-profit organizations (NGOs) to explore ways to work jointly on embedding more analytics in their agencies.
Dr. Schneur received the 2004 Edelman award as part of a team from Motorola and Emptoris. She is the co-inventor of a patent on “Auctions with Volume Discounts”.
BSc (Civil Engineering), Technion 1986, Israel; MSc (Engineering and Transportation/Logistics) and PhD (Operations Research and Engineering), MIT (1991).