Northwestern Industrial Engineering

Congratulations to IEMS PhD student Sha Chen and IEMS professor and Director of Graduate Studies Seyed Iravani for receiving the 2026 IISE Transactions Service Best Paper Award for the Supply Chain and Logistics focus issue for their research titled, "Admission and routing control of multiple queues with multiple types of customers."

The awardees were formally recognized during a special session at the 2026 IISE Annual Conference in Arlington, TX. We are so proud of you both!

We are proud to share that Department Chair, Professor Simge Kucukyavuz, and IEMS PhD student Akul Bansal received the best poster award at the 2026 Mixed Integer Programming Workshop for their joint research on "Normalization of ReLU Dual for Cut Generation in Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs."

Congratulations - we are so proud to celebrate your achievements!

We are so proud to announce that our very own Barry Nelson, Walter P. Murphy Professor Emeritus of IEMS, won a 2026 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from Purdue University. This prestigious honor is presented to people who have distinguished themselves in ways that reflect favorably on Purdue University, the engineering profession, or society in general.

Read more about Dr. Nelson, his concentration areas, and academic and industry careers using the link below.

https://tinyurl.com/dv82vydr

Last weekend our department competed as a finalist for the INFORMS 2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize. The prize is awarded to universities that excel at preparing students to become real-world practitioners of operations research and analytics. Georgia Tech took home the win this year (congrats!) and we were honored to be recognized alongside them and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Our students made the most of every moment at the 2026 INFORMS Analytics+Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. From bonding with West Point cadets to attending sessions on the exciting intersection of AI, machine learning, and optimization, they came back energized and reminded of just how well their IEMS training prepares them for where this field is headed. We're so proud of our students and grateful for the Northwestern University community that supports them.

Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gDJxJw9u

We are proud to share that Jim Dai, Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University, delivered the 2026 Wasserstrom Distinguished Lecture!

Dai's talk, "M-COF: A Framework for Scalable Control of Stochastic Processing Networks," shared new research on how to better understand and optimize complex service systems.

Click the link below to read more.

https://tinyurl.com/5ba4a9kf

Cornell’s Jim Dai Delivers 2026 Wasserstrom Lecture Dai shared research on how to better understand and optimize complex service systems such as data centers and communication networks.

We are so proud to share that IEMS at Northwestern University has been named a finalist for the 2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in analytics education!

"Being named a finalist for the UPS George D. Smith Prize affirms our department's commitment to bridging rigorous analytical foundations with the real-world complexity of modern decision-making," says Chair and David A. and Karen Richards Sachs Professor of IEMS Simge Kucukyavuz. "As operations research continues to converge with AI and data science, IEMS is proud to be at the forefront of preparing the next generation of practitioners.

Many thanks to Jill Hardin Wilson, Michael Watson, Yuri Balasanov, Diego Klabjan, Mark Werwath, Moses Chan, Simge Kucukyavuz, and Seyed Iravani for leading our department's various degree programs.

We look forward to our presentation on April 12 at the Analytics+ conference!

Read more: http://spr.ly/6044B6W2kQ

Congratulations to our very own adjunct faculty member Andreas Waechter for winning the 2026 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) SIAG/Optimization Test of Time Award for his paper, “On the implementation of an interior-point filter line-search algorithm for large-scale nonlinear programming.”

Twenty years after its publication, the widely used algorithm described in Waechter's paper remains the most effective approach for solving general nonlinear optimization problems.

Click the link below to learn more.

Prize History | SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Test of Time Award | SIAM Learn more about the past recipients of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Test of Time Award.