Awards Releases

INFORMS has awarded Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) its 2026 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, for reengineering how global cloud infrastructure is planned and delivered, applying advanced analytics and AI to orchestrate complex fulfillment decisions across its rapidly expanding data center network.

INFORMS has awarded Microsoft, a global leader in cloud computing and technology solutions, the 2026 INFORMS Prize. This prestigious award recognizes Microsoft’s use of advanced analytics and O.R. to optimize its end-to-end cloud infrastructure and capacity management to deliver best-in-class efficiency, scalability and reliability.

INFORMS has awarded the 2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). The award recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of O.R. and analytics.

INFORMS has awarded the INFORMS Early Career Practitioner Award to Athanasios (Thanos) Lolos, principal data scientist at Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU), for his outstanding contributions in applying operations research and advanced analytics to real-world financial challenges. 

The Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and the U.S. Military Academy are recognized for excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of operations research, analytics and data science. 

The finalists for the 2026 Franz Edelman Award innovate in supply-chain replenishment, food distribution, cloud fulfillment and carbon-aware high-performance computing.

INFORMS has awarded the 2025 Daniel H. Wagner Prize to a team of researchers from George Washington University and the Meituan Group for the paper “Rebalancing and Pricing of Near-Expiry Inventory in Online Grocery Retail."

Renato D.C. Monteiro, Ph.D. of Georgia Tech has been awarded the 2025 John von Neumann Theory Prize—one of the organization’s highest honors.

Brian Denton and Les Servi have each been awarded the 2025 George E. Kimball Medal, honoring their decades of distinguished service and transformative contributions to the field of operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS). 

INFORMS has named Anna Nagurney, the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as the recipient of the 2025 INFORMS President’s Award.