Professor Jim Dai has recently been awarded the Edenfield 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. James C. Edenfield (IE '57), CEO and President of American Software Inc, established the Edenfield Professorship as a way to support the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech in sustaining and leading the field in research and education.

In announcing the award, Chelsea White, Stewart School Chair stated, "Jim Dai is an exceptional, internationally well-known and respected leader in applied probability who has received many awards for his outstanding scholarly contributions, both in basic and applied research. Jim also has provided distinguished leadership to the stochastics group in the Stewart School. We are very proud to have Jim on the faculty as a scholar, teacher, academic leader, and colleague."

A leading researcher in the applied probability community, Professor Dai focuses on stochastic processing networks. These networks have been used for the design, analysis and control of many complex systems including communication networks such as the Internet, manufacturing systems such as semiconductor wafer fabrication lines, and large service systems like customer call centers or web server farms. In recent years, he has also led an effort in understanding the Chinese logistics industry.

Professor Dai is a fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and a member of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has served as an associate editor for Operations Research, Management of Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, and Queueing Systems. He is a founding editorial board member for Foundations and Trends in Stochastic Systems. He is also a founding associate editor for an IMS journal Probability Surveys. Currently, he is a Series Editor for Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, co-editing with J. K. Lenstra and G. L. Nemhauser.

Some of the honors and awards he has received include:
* IBM Faculty Award 2003
* Erlang Prize, Applied Probability Society of INFORMS April 1998
* Best Publication Award, Applied Probability Society of INFORMS May 1997
* Presidential Young Investigator, National Science Foundation 1994

Professor Dai received his B.A. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Nanjing University, in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Stanford University in 1990. He was a visiting professor first at Aarhus University and later at Stanford University during his sabbatical year in 1998. He was also a visiting professor at National University of Singapore in summer 2001. Since 2002 he has been a distinguished visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Jim Dai joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990. Since 1998 he has been a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering. From 1990 to 2002, he also held a joint appointment in the School of Mathematics.

"I am honored to receive the Edenfield Professorship,* said Dai. "I hope this honor will bring more recognition to the work of our Stochastic Systems Group."