Thomas L. Magnanti

Brief Biography

Thomas L. Magnanti was the 5th President of INFORMS and the 37th President of ORSA. He was the Founding President of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, a post he assumed in October 2009, and became President Emeritus in April 2018.  Under Magnanti’s leadership, the school admitted its first undergraduate class in 2012.

Dr. Magnanti has spent the greater part of his academic career at MIT where he is an Institute Professor and was formerly Dean of the School of Engineering (1997 -2007) and head of the Management Science area of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Magnanti was founding co-director of the Leaders for Manufacturing and Systems Design and Management Program and founding director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. He was Co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center from 1986 to 1998.

Professor Magnanti has devoted much of his professional career to education that combines engineering and management and to teaching and research in applied and theoretical aspects of large-scale optimization. He has conducted research on optimization theory and on such topics as production planning and scheduling, transportation planning, facility location, networks, logistics, and communication systems design. His 100 publications include co-authorship of two textbooks, Applied Mathematical Programming and Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms and Applications, and the co-editorship of two other books.

He is an inaugural Fellow of INFORMS (2002), a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000). His awards include the Lanchester Prize (1993) and the George E. Kimball Medal (1994) and awards at MIT for educational innovations and distinguished service. He has served on the advisory boards and board of directors for several leading universities and corporations.

For several decades, Dr. Magnanti has been a strong, positive and enthusiastic force behind many of the ORSA’s and INFORMS changes and developments. As President of ORSA, he saw the need to improve the joint activities of ORSA and TIMS and convened the first joint meeting of both councils, the initial step in the eventual merger of ORSA and TIMS. As Chair of the ORSA Education and Student Affairs Committee, he proposed the concept of the Doctoral Student Colloquium. As President of INFORMS, he established a new meeting structure, with a single national meeting each year and the introduction of the INFORMS Practice meeting. And, as Editor of Operations Research, Dr. Magnanti addressed and solved the challenge of how to make ORSA’s flagship journal more accessible and readable.

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for Thomas L. Magnanti 

Thomas L. Magnanti (2018) Alchetron.com ~ Free Social Encyclopedia for the World (link) 

Thomas Magnanti (2010) Interview by Lawrence Gallagher. April 6, 2010. Video. The MIT 150 Infinite Oral History Project. (video and transcript)