Community Prizes and Awards

Minority Issues Forum

One way to increase underrepresented minorities within the OR/MS profession is to highlight the up and coming professionals of tomorrow. Since 2004, MIF has sponsored the travel of underrepresented minority doctoral students close to finishing and showcased their research through a poster session given in conjunction with the MIF’s welcoming reception at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

Optimization Society

Awards four prizes annually at the INFORMS annual meeting. The award winners will be invited to give a presentation in a special session sponsored by the Optimization Society during the INFORMS Annual Meeting (the winners will be responsible for their own travel expenses to the meeting). Award winners are also asked to contribute an article about their award-winning work to the annual Optimization Society newsletter.

Pride Forum

The Pride Forum encourages any member of INFORMS who self identifies as an Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and other (LGBTQ+) community member or an ally of the LGBTQ+ community to join the forum. An ally is an individual who is not a member of the LGBTQ+ community themselves but is motivated to support and help advance the interests of LGBTQ+ community.

Service Science Section

Promote and disseminate research and applications among professionals interested in theory, methodologies, and applications in Service Science, which cuts across the fields of services business strategy and modeling, service operations research and management, information systems, marketing science and analytics, management science, e-commerce and e-business, industrial engineering, and social and cognitive science.

The Practice Section

The Practice Section of INFORMS serves the entire community of full-time and part-time practitioners. Thus, while it concentrates on practical applications, The Practice Section has wide interests that range over the full scope of OR/MS methods and fields of application. The Practice Section administers three INFORMS level awards: Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research, Franz Edelman Award, and UPS George D. Smith Prize.

Transportation Science and Logistics Section

Sustained, specialized focus on Air Transportation, Freight Transportation and Logistics, Urban Transportation Planning and Modeling, Facility Logistics, and Intelligent Transportation Systems, including current and potential problems and contributions to their solution, and supports efforts to extend, unify, and integrate related branches of knowledge and practice.