INFORMS President, 2001
James C. Bean was the 7th President of INFORMS. He is Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oregon. He came to Oregon in 2004 as Dean of the Lundquist College of Business and Harry B. Miller Professor of Business (operations research). Previously he served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the University of Michigan College of Engineering and Ford Motor Company Co-director of Michigan’s Joel D. Tauber Manufacturing Institute. He is also an Advisory Professor in Industrial Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Professor Bean has authored/co-authored over 50 papers in the theory and application of infinite horizon optimization, Markov decision processes and genetic algorithms to problems in resource allocation, scheduling and production control. This includes development of the random keys encoding for applying genetic algorithms to complex sequencing problems, and foundational work on existence of forecasting horizons with Robert Smith. Professor Bean has worked on various industrial projects with companies addressing challenges in production control, asset allocation and scheduling.
Bean has served as Associate Editor of Management Science, Editor of the ORSA/TIMS Annual Comprehensive Index, the first electronic publication of the organizations. He was elected as ORSA Council member, Chair of the Joint ORSA/TIMS Information Technology Committee (appointed during ORSA/TIMS merger), and inaugural Vice President for Information Technology of INFORMS. During this period he helped design the initial version of INFORMS Online and recommended Mike Trick as its first permanent Editor. He was later Secretary of INFORMS.
Early in his career Bean was recognized as Outstanding Teacher in Industrial and Operations Engineering at Michigan seven times. He led a Homart Development/University of Michigan team to Second Prize in the Edelman Prize competition in 1986, and was given the Fellows Award in its inaugural year (2002). He has been appointed by the President of MIT to two terms on the Corporation Visiting Committee for Engineering Systems at MIT, and by the Governor of Oregon to the state’s Innovation Council.
During his term as President, INFORMS reorganized the Board into its current format, reducing its size by nearly half, designed the Fellows Award Program, and established broad electronic access to INFORMS publications by negotiating paper level database access through a number of information vendors.
B.S. Harvey Mudd College, 1977, MS Stanford University, 1979, PhD (Operations Research) Stanford University, 1980