Past Awards
Peter C. Bell was a professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business of Western University, Canada, from 1977 to 2018 and is now a professor emeritus and adjunct research professor. He earned his BA and MA from Oxford University and his MBA and PhD from the Graduate School of Business (now Booth) at the University of Chicago.
Professor Bell’s early research used interactive computer-generated graphics to address real management problems and led to a career-long interest in practice. His research program has produced more than 100 articles in scholarly and management journals and 16 books. A champion for the use of real-world cases in teaching analytics, he has written some 150 business cases and delivered case teaching workshops, seminars, and presentations in more than 20 countries. He organized the second Annual Summer Workshop on Teaching Management Science, which focused on the interactive classroom, and won awards for MBA teaching and teaching innovation, as well as the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of the OR/MS Practice.
His INFORMS activities include two Board terms as Vice President–International Activities; Chair of the Practice Section (formerly CPMS); Chair of the Edelman Prize Competition; many years as an Edelman Prize judge, verifier, and team coach; Master of Ceremonies at the Edelman Gala; and Associate Editor for Operations Research and the INFORMS Journal of Applied Analytics, as well as service on many INFORMS committees.
For more than 20 years, Professor Bell served on the Board of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS), first as North American Vice President, then President, Past President, Coordinator of Publications, and finally Treasurer. During this time he was program chair for the first-ever conference on multimedia operations research and founded and served as inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the IFORS journal International Transactions in Operational Research. As IFORS President (1995–1997), he presided over the 1996 Vancouver conference that attracted 950 registrants from 48 countries and played an instrumental role in organizing the 1999 Beijing conference that attracted almost 1,000 registrants from 46 countries. In addition to his leadership roles in IFORS, he is a Past President of the Canadian Operational Research Society; an Award of Merit winner, he was elected an emeritus member in 2018.
Professor Bell was elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2006. He has also provided consulting services to corporations, hospitals, small businesses, lawyers, charities, and government agencies and served on a number of boards of directors.
For his many contributions to the field of operations research and management science, including innovation in teaching and extensive involvement in society activities, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation to Peter C. Bell by awarding him the 2019 George E. Kimball Medal.
Professor Peter C. Bell has been teaching OR/MS at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario for more than 25 years. During that time, his teaching has given OR/MS the breath of life. He has taught his students the fundamental OR/MS techniques as well as a keen sense of their potential impact.
Professor Bell teaches at a case-teaching Business School. He has written over 100 cases, along with relevant teaching notes. When INFORMS decided to build a library of OR/MS cases, Professor Bell was commissioned to develop several cases as an initial step.
Professor Bell teaches hundreds of students each year. He teaches in the undergraduate, MBA, and EMBA programs. Whereas OR/MS has declined in visibility at many Business Schools over the last fifteen years, it has flourished within the Ivey School. OR/MS is a core component of every degree program taught at the Ivey School. Within the core, students spend as much time learning about OR/MS as they do any other discipline. This is almost single-handedly attributable to the extraordinarily successful courses developed and taught by Professor Bell and his junior colleagues.
Professor Bell’s courses differ from traditional OR/MS courses in at least two ways. First, he teaches OR/MS via cases. Second, he has pioneered the teaching of strategic OR/MS. Thus, he focuses on real-world applications of OR/MS that create a competitive advantage for an enterprise.
Numerous letters attest to the enormous influence Professor Bell has had on his students’ careers in industry. For example, a former student, currently working as an investment banking analyst, writes, “When faced with a daunting problem, I instinctively think back to particular cases that we completed in his class that seem to be similarly structured, and then do my best to apply the approach to my own situation.”
For his exceptional success in teaching so many students how to apply OR/MS in the real world, INFORMS is proud to award its prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice to Peter C. Bell.