Past Awards
Over a career of more than 25 years of serving the public interest, Jan Chaiken is an exemplary recipient of the President's Award. He was an early participant in the pioneering work of the New York City-RAND Institute in the late 1960s, where he worked on fire department deployment problems and made important contributions to the allocation of police patrol vehicles. He moved to RAND in Santa Monica in 1972 and became a major participant in the work of RAND in criminal justice. He pursued research on modeling the criminal justice system, studies of the criminal investigation process, and analysis of criminal careers. He left RAND for Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1984, and was an important participant in many aspects of their work, including the development of the FBI's incident-based crime reporting system, which is now being implemented by an increasing number of police departments. In 1994, he was named by President Clinton to be the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that position, he has been instrumental in bringing modern web-based technology to making BJS data widely and readily available for the public and for the research community. He has also led the efforts to implement effective and rapid interchange of criminal history information and to develop effective computerized tracking of offenders through the federal criminal justice system.
Dr. Chaiken's background is in mathematics: His PhD is from MIT and he taught at Cornell and UCLA. He has been a long-time member of INFORMS and its predecessor organizations. We are pleased to present the President's Award to our colleague, Jan Chaiken, for his effective and important contributions to the public interest.
— Karla L. Hoffman, INFORMS President 1998 (presenting the award in May 1999)