Past Awards
The 2025 Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award is awarded to Benjamin Van Roy for serving as an outstanding spokesperson for the operations research profession through his work at the intersection of operations research and machine learning, specifically for contributions to sequential decision-making, learning theory, reinforcement learning, alignment, and related applications. This award is given by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in honor of Philip McCord Morse, in recognition of Professor Morse’s pioneering contributions to the field of operations research and his devoted service to the field’s professional societies.
These papers have made fundamental contributions to the area of online statistical learning and optimization, providing a unifying view of a broad set of these problems. The work has changed the way the entire field conceptualizes foundational approaches to the acquisition and exploitation of information, and it has opened up new avenues for both theoretical and applied work.