Huseyin Topaloglu is promoted to full professor

A member of ORIE’s faculty since 2002, Huseyin Topaloglu has been promoted to full professor. 

Professor Topaloglu is an internationally recognized expert in the area of revenue management, an application of operations research that matches demand and supply of a commodity at prices that maximize some objective such as total revenue generated over time. In 2011, he won the prize for the best paper published in the Transactions of the Institute of Industrial Engineering. In 2010 he received an award from The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for the best contribution to the science of pricing and revenue management published in English. In 2009 he and his collaborators won an annual competition, the COIN-OR Cup, for their work on air cargo capacity management and dynamic pricing as a contribution to the COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR).

Topaloglu is recognized as a stellar teacher.  He received the College of Engineering’s Sonny Yau ’72 Teaching Award in 2005 and 2012. His courses in simulation modelling and analysis, revenue management, and systems engineering regularly win high ratings from students, several of whom call him one of the best professors they have had at Cornell. In the simulation modeling class he shows how to model, simulate and analyze complicated systems operating under uncertainty. The topics in his revenue management course find application in airline pricing, hospitality, and online retail. His systems engineering course, which is cross-listed across seven departments, deals with the use of operations research and other techniques to design, analyze and operate complex systems.

The areas of Topaloglu’s research and writing find application in online retail, airline revenue, and the operation of ambulance services. He has developed mathematical models that help determine what assortment of products to make available to online customers and at what prices. He has determined how airlines should open specific itineraries for sale to customers as capacities on the flight network get depleted over time. With ORIE professor Shane Henderson and recent Ph.D. graduate Matt Maxwell his work assists the redeployment of ambulances to cover demand to best meet emergency calls. These research areas employ advanced techniques in statistics and in the computational optimization of large-scale systems subject that are subject to uncertainty.   

He is an associate editor of IIE Transactions, Management Science, Mathematical Programming C, Operations Research, Transportation Science, and Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science, and serves on key committees at Cornell and in INFORMS.    

Topaloglu received a BS from Bogazici University, Istanbul, in 1997, an MS from Princeton University in 1999 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 2001.