TIMS President, 1957
Roger Ryan Crane was a founding member of TIMS and its fourth president. In addition to being active in TIMS for many years, Dr. Crane also encouraged his staff to take an active role in the Society. He was a Council member of both ORSA and TIMS and spent considerable effort on establishing activities of a cooperative nature between the two societies. Specifically, Dr. Crane played a very influential role in convincing the leadership of ORSA and TIMS to share their national meetings.
Upon graduation from the University of Toronto, Dr. Crane became a member of the Operations Evaluation Group at MIT from 1948 to 1951. In 1960 Dr. Crane was founding co-editor (with Dr. C.W. Churchman) of Management Technology, and served as the editor of this journal during 1961-66. This publication was established to be accessible to managers and was the precursor of Management Science Series B (1972), which, in turn, was the precursor of Interfaces.
Dr. Crane founded and directed OR/MS groups at Westinghouse Air Brake Co.(1951-55) and Touche Ross Bailey and Smart (1955-68). The visible success of these groups had a strong influence on the growth of OR/MS in industry and academia.For many years Dr. Crane and Dr. Churchman held a series of roundtable discussions for managers and OR practitioners at the firehouse in Bolinas, California, north of San Francisco. Through such efforts, Dr. Crane did much to expand the practice of OR/MS and to make its potential known to high-level managers.
In 1968, Dr. Crane became senior vice president of Science Management Corporation. He then formed a consulting organization, Roger Crane Group Inc., in 1975. Later, this organization included both Decision Support Facilities Ltd. and Roger Crane Consultants Ltd. and had offices in London and Milan. Dr. Crane was also a director of Moped S.P.A. and chairman of Information Based Organizations Ltd.
BA, Toronto, MS, MIT; PhD Kennedy-Western University (Cheyenne, Wyoming)