Professor Martin Savelsbergh has been awarded the Schneider Professorship for a three-year term. Endowed professorships help support outstanding faculty, ensuring them the resources they need to remain at the forefront of their fields and to lead teaching and research efforts in their key areas. The Schneider Professorship is supported by a gift from the Schneider National Company, one of the Nation's largest national truckload carriers, in order to support research and development in logistics and supply chain engineering in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Chelsea White, Stewart School Chair, stated in announcing the award, "Martin Savelsbergh is an outstanding internationally well-known and respected academic leader, scholar, and teacher in logistics and supply chain engineering. He has in particular made many contributions to both the academic community and the logistics and transportation industry with his innovative research. We are delighted to have Martin as a colleague and faculty member who contributes in so many ways to the excellent reputation of the Stewart School."

Martin Savelsbergh, professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and research director of The Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, is a logistics and optimization specialist with over 20 years of experience in mathematical modeling, operations research, optimization methods, algorithm design, performance analysis, supply chain management, production planning, and transportation.

Professor Savelsbergh designs and implements highly sophisticated and effective optimization algorithms and has published over 80 research papers in many of the top operations research and optimization journals. He also analyzes practical decision problems and translates the insights obtained into optimal business solutions. He is well known internationally for creating innovative techniques for solving large-scale optimization problems in a variety of areas, ranging from vehicle routing and scheduling problems, to per-seat on-demand air transportation problems, to lot-sizing problems.

Some of his on-going industry sponsored research projects include:
* the development of congestion management technology for Yellow Roadway Corporation, a large LTL carrier;
* the development of order acceptance and flight scheduling technology for DayJet, a per-seat on-demand air transportation service provider;
* the development of cost-to-serve analysis technology for Praxair, a large industrial gas distributor; and
* the development of collaborative transportation procurement technology for RubberNetwork, a conglomerate of tire companies.

Other research projects that Professor Savelsbergh is involved in include:
* the analysis of the value of allowing deliveries to be split during distribution,
* the development of technology for inventory routing problems,
* the analysis of dispatch strategies for environments where requests for service arrive dynamically over time and where contracts are in place that guarantee service within a certain period,
* the cost-effective delivery of blood to regional hospitals operating with vendor managed inventory policies,
* the development and analysis of technology for effectively using meet-and-turn points in regional LTL networks,
* the development of robust empty container management models, and carrier bid optimization in the presence of competition.

Martin Savelsbergh serves as Area Editor for Operations Research Letters, Associate Editor for Mathematics of Operations Research, Networks, and Naval Logistics Research, and he is a member of the editorial board of Computers & Operations Research and Constraints. He received the Best Paper Award in the Transportation and Logistics Section for his paper titled "Dynamic Programming Approximations for a Stochastic Inventory Routing Problem" at INFORMS in 2005. He has given presentations and short courses on optimization and logistics in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Dr. Savelsbergh received a M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Amsterdam and his Ph.D. from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

"It is an always an honor to be recognized for work done and services performed,* said Savelsbergh. "I'm especially happy that it is the Schneider Professorship as my research focuses on transportation issue and Schneider has always shown a keen interest in transportation innovation.*