Past Awards
Don N. Kleinmuntz is Executive Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer at Strata Decision Technology, a leading provider of financial analytics software to the healthcare industry that he and his wife, Dr. Catherine Kleinmuntz, founded in 1996. Previously, he served as the company’s CEO, CFO, and CIO. Over the course of his career, he has been a passionate advocate for blending academic rigor with practical relevance, and is an acknowledged expert on decision and risk analysis, business analytics, and leveraging information technology to improve organizational decision making. Don has collaborated in the design and implementation of budgeting and planning systems that are in use at close to 1,000 hospitals across the United States, including many large healthcare systems and sophisticated academic medical centers. He has consulted to hospitals, a wide variety of companies and organizations, and several government agencies.
Don Kleinmuntz’s business pursuits have followed a successful academic career. Don holds a BA in Statistics and an MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and USC. Dr. Kleinmuntz published on a wide range of topics related to decision making, including fundamental and methodological research on cognitive processes in judgment and decision making, methods and approaches for improving decision making, and applied work on decision making models and processes for accounting, financial management, resource allocation, and risk management.
Dr. Kleinmuntz is an INFORMS Fellow and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. In 2011 the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society awarded Dr. Kleinmuntz the Frank P. Ramsey Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Decision Analysis, an award that recognizes career contributions to the field in academia, business practice, or service to the profession, with the award committee citing notable contributions in all three areas.
An active and committed member of INFORMS, Don joined both TIMS and ORSA early in his career, and was active in the predecessor to the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. Don served as an officer of the Decision Analysis Society for four years, and as an officer on the INFORMS Board for a total of seven years, including serving as President in 2009 and four years as Treasurer. He has served on many INFORMS committees, including long service on both the Finance and Investment Committees. As Treasurer, he helped to stabilize the organization’s finances. As President-Elect and President, Don worked to facilitate both international and academic-industry collaboration, and made pivotal contributions to a strategic planning process that led to a major new initiative in business analytics. He also was one of the inaugural Editors-in-Chief of the journal Decision Analysis, and an Associate Editor of Management Science.
For his many contributions to the field of operations research and management science, and for his distinguished service to INFORMS and its predecessor organizations, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation to Don N. Kleinmuntz by awarding him the 2012 George E. Kimball Medal.