Past Awards
The 2008 INFORMS President’s Award is awarded to Margaret L. Brandeau for her pioneering research on public health policy models, including those for HIV and drug abuse prevention and treatment, and for translating her results into improved U.S. and international health policies.
Stanford Professor Margaret Brandeau is a distinguished operations researcher, with exemplary contributions to a wide range of problems of grave importance to society. Her work at the intersection of operations research and policy analysis melds her extensive background in the development of applied mathematical and economic models with her deep knowledge base and passion for addressing important public health problems. For more than 20 years, Brandeau has contributed to a broad range of important topics including ambulance location, clinical decision making, models for hospital financial planning, and policy models for HIV and drug abuse prevention and treatment. She has published model-based analyses of policy issues such as HIV screening for pregnant women and newborns; allocation of HIV treatment resources in Russia; methadone and buprenorphine maintenance therapy for injection drug users; bioterror response planning; and screening and vaccination policies for Hepatitis B prevention and treatment both in the US and China.
Brandeau’s work on HIV and drug abuse prevention and treatment has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and is one of the very few NIDA-funded grants (if not the only one) to use OR to inform policy problems. In the words of Dr. Peter Hartsock, Director Research Scientist Officer, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “The research program that Margaret has built with her colleagues constitutes possibly the largest and longest running HIV/AIDS modeling program in the world.” He adds, “Margaret’s work has been remarkably translational. She has the ability to conduct cutting edge science and translate the results so that they can be used by other scientists, service providers, planners and policy makers. This is a very special gift of Margaret’s.”
The President's Award is made for contributions to the welfare of society. Through Margaret’s efforts, she has brought the methods of operations research to difficult resource allocation problems in national and international public health, and helped improve decision-making regarding the allocation of scarce health resources. I am therefore pleased to present the 2008 INFORMS President's Award to Margaret L. Brandeau, Professor and Deputy Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and Courtesy Professor of Medicine, at Stanford University.