Professor George Nemhauser is the A. Russell Chandler Chaired Professor in ISyE. He received a Ph.D. in operations research from Northwestern University in 1961, and joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University where he remained until 1969. In 1970, he joined Cornell University as a professor in operations research and industrial engineering and served as school director from 1977 to 1983. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Leeds, U.K., the University of Louvain, Belgium and the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has served the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) as council member, president, and editor of Operations Research, and he is past chair of the Mathematical Programming Society. He was the founding editor of Operations Research Letters, and founding co-editor of Handbooks of Operations Research and Management Science.

Dr. Nemhauser has served various governmental agencies, including the NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Research Council (NRC). He was a member of the NRC's Board of Mathematical Sciences. His honors and awards include membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the Kimball Medal, the Lanchester Prize (twice awarded), Morse lecturer of INFORMS and the Khachiyan prize of INFORMS for lifetime achievements in optimization. His current research interests are in solving large-scale mixed-integer programming problems. He is actively working on several applications, including maritime inventory routing.

Pang joins the USC Viterbi Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering this fall, where he hopes to continue his research efforts, tap into USC’s diverse, multi-disciplinary resources, and collaborate on the cutting-edge research that is being done at the Viterbi School.

Pang is well known within the optimization circles because of the groundbreaking work he has done, Professor Sen said. He is among a small group of scholars who have received both the George B. Dantzig Prize, which is jointly awarded by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, which is awarded by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.

In addition to his research, Pang has served as a leader in both the academic and administrative sides of the field. Having worked extensively as a professor, department head and program director, Pang truly understands the ins and outs of the field, including the opportunities and challenges. He has considerable experience teaching future researchers in the lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and John Hopkins University, among others, on one hand; and making key decisions on research funding at the National Science Foundation on the other.

Pang most recently served as the inaugural head of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois, where he helped build the department. With the department now on solid ground, he is ready to embark on his next challenge: to help take USC Viterbi’s research and stature to the next level.