This article originally appeared in the 2024 ORIE Magazine. Written by Chris Dawson.

The field of operations research has been a part of Cornell Engineering since at least as far back as 1904, when Professor Dexter Kimball of Cornell’s Sibley College created a new course he wanted to call “Economics of Production.” He was talked out of using this title by someone who told him it sounded “too high-brow,” so instead he called the class “Works Administration.” In that class Kimball focused on, as you might guess, the economics of production.

This class was unique in all of American higher education. In 1913, after teaching the class for nine years, Kimball expanded his lectures into the book “Principals of Industrial Organization.” A year later, the Sibley College created a Department of Industrial Engineering. Over the intervening years the names “administrative engineering,” “operations analysis,” and, eventually, “operations research” were all applied to the field.

No matter the name, the goals of the field have always been the same: To apply scientific and mathematical methods to influence and impact organizational and managerial process improvement, productivity, and performance. The purpose of ORIE today is the same: to use data and mathematical models to help organizations and people make better decisions.

In the early twentieth century a primary focus was making manufacturing processes more efficient. During and after World War II a major goal of the field was making supply chains function more reliably and economically. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s computers became more common and more powerful and mathematics and the applications of statistics became an increasingly important part of operations research. At Cornell, courses in Operations Research were introduced in 1955. In 1961 the Department of Industrial Engineering and Administration and the graduate field of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research were established. In the 1965-66 academic year ORIE became an official school of the college.

It is tempting to paint those early years of the school starting in the mid-1960s as a golden age of Cornell ORIE, but that would not be an accurate assessment. Yes, Uma Prabhu, Robert Bechhofer, Lionel Weiss, Andrew Schultz, Richard Conway, and William Maxwell were all at Cornell. But if you pick any ten-year period in ORIE’s history you will find another set of researchers of equal ability and stature. In truth, and with all humility, we can say that all 58  years of the school’s existence have been a golden age. Since its founding Cornell’s School of ORIE has been a well-respected leader in both academia and industry. ORIE faculty have been at the leading edge of production scheduling, supply-chain management, applied statistics, optimization, game theory, stochastic processes, discrete optimization, discrete-event simulation, queueing models, applied probability, and financial engineering, to give an incomplete list. Our history makes us proud to look back.

In 1989 Cornell ORIE hosted the first ever academic meeting to focus on financial engineering. By 1995 the financial engineering program at Cornell became a formal offering. In 2005 ORIE opened an office in Manhattan’s financial district and today Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM) is a wildly popular and successful Master of Engineering program. Cornell ORIE recognized the importance of having a presence in New York City almost twenty years ago and now roughly 20% of the ORIE faculty work on Roosevelt Island at CFEM or Cornell Tech. That number will only continue to grow.

In September 2024 we will be hosting two separate 100th birthday celebrations to commemorate the lives and contributions of ORIE Professors Uma Prabhu and Ray Fulkerson. Both men played an outsized role in the history of ORIE at Cornell as well as in the fields of large-scale linear programming, combinatorial optimization, applied probability, and queueing theory.

Looking Forward

One of the hallmarks of the Cornell School of ORIE is the dual focus on theory and applications. Students learn how and when to apply sophisticated mathematical and analytical techniques and quantitative methodologies, but they also learn where these techniques come from and how and why they work. ORIE students graduate with not just a completely stocked toolbox of methods and techniques, but also a well-informed sense of when each particular tool should be used.

Cornell ORIE consistently ranks in the top ten schools for Operations Research year after year. We continue to attract gifted undergraduate and graduate students and powerhouse faculty who are drawn, certainly, by the reputation of the school but even more so by the opportunity to work with some of the brightest students and fellow faculty in the field.

In the 2023-24 academic year alone four new faculty members have started at ORIE, with another slated to start in July 2024. These five newest members of the ORIE faculty, Raaz Dwivedi, Kyra Gan, Paul Gölz, Ziv Scully, and Soroosh Shafiee, highlight the broad array of domains to which OR methods and techniques can be applied. Their work also spans the range from theoretical to practical.

Dwivedi’s research involves a multi-disciplinary approach to data science and brings together ideas from computer science, electrical engineering, and statistics in collaboration with domain experts. His research develops statistical machine learning approaches for personalized decision-making and healthcare applications.

Gan’s research interests include adaptive/online algorithm design in personalized treatment under constraint settings, computerized/automated inference methods, robust causal discovery in medical data, and fairness in organ transplants. More broadly, she is interested in bridging the gap between research and practice in healthcare.

Gölz, who will join the faculty in July of 2024, describes his research interests succinctly. “I think about new ways of doing democracy (for example, citizens’ assemblies), and about how to fairly allocate resources ( e.g. capacity to host refugees).”

Scully’s focus is more theoretical, looking at decision making under uncertainty, including stochastic control, resource allocation, and performance evaluation. A particular emphasis of his work is scheduling and load balancing in queueing systems, as motivated by the needs of cloud computing data centers and service systems.

And Shafiee combines theory and applications. His research interests revolve around optimization under uncertainty, low-complexity decision-making and optimal transport. Most of his works falls into one of three categories: Designing new models and algorithms based on (distributionally) robust optimization, statistical and computational complexity analyses of data-driven optimization problems, or structured nonconvex optimization with application in machine learning and finance.

We have many reasons to look back with pride at where Cornell’s School of ORIE has been and the leading role we have played all along in the broad field of operations research. But that has not stopped us from looking forward, as well. There is too great a legacy to stop now and rest on our laurels. The fall semester of 2025 will mark the start of ORIE’s 60th year as a school and in many ways, it feels as if we are just getting started.