Past Awards
The INFORMS President’s Award is given to recognize work that advances the welfare of society. Vijay Chandru is both a leading academic and a successful entrepreneur whose overriding vision involves using his skills to benefit others. As an academic, Vijay is well-known for his work on combinatorial optimization. Vijay’s impact extends far beyond his academic activities. He was the driving force behind the 1998 Bangalore Declaration on Information Technology which led to the development of the Simputer, a small low-cost computer which has been used to improve primary school education, government land records acquisition, and electricity billing in rural India. The Simputer is being tested in countries in Africa as a means of bringing Internet connectivity to third world countries. Vijay is also the Co-Founder of Strand Life Sciences, a company dedicated to the development and deployment of advanced data mining and visualization algorithms, natural language processing, and predictive modeling technologies. Strand’s product applications include: gene expression data analysis, biomarker discovery, pre-clinical and clinical data analysis, drug pharmacokinetic and toxicity property modeling, and analyzing healthcare-provider performance. Strand software has been used in microarray gene expression analysis to study a variety of cancer cells, SARS, autism, and brain pathologies.