INFORMS President, 2007
Brenda Dietrich was the 13th President of INFORMS. She is an IBM Fellow and Vice President of the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Her research includes manufacturing scheduling, services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality. She has twice been named one of IBM's top inventors. She brings a business perspective to projects. She is a founding member of COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR), the open source repository for OR software, which provides the project access to the world's largest repository of free Operations Research and Industrial Engineering computer-based tools.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the IE/MS department of Northwestern University, a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for both the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA, U. of Minnesota) and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science,(DIMACS at Rutgers), and IBM’s delegate to MIT’s Supply Chain 2020 program. She holds 13 patents and has 20 patents applied for. She co-authored numerous publications, and co-edited the book Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets.
She has been a member of the INFORMS Roundtable, served on the INFORMS board as VP for Practice, was chair of the advisory committee for the first two Practice meetings. She was a member of the editorial board of Management and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) and is currently on the editorial board of Logistics Research Quarterly.
As President of INFORMS she established the strategic planning process, and participated in the launch of the Analytics online magazine.
BS (Mathematics) University of North Carolina, 1980; MS (IE/OR) 1983 and PhD (MS/OR) Cornell 1985