William J. Cook will join ISyE this summer as Russ and Sammie Chandler Chair in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Dr. Cook is currently a visiting professor in the Program for Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization from the University of Waterloo, as well as a B.A. in Mathematics from Rutgers University and an M.S. in Operations Research from Stanford University.

Dr. Cook's research interests are in the two closely related fields of integer programming and combinatorial optimization. His research on the "traveling salesman problem" (TSP), including the solution to a 15,112 TSP tour of cities in Germany, can be viewed at www.math.princeton.edu/tsp. This site is used widely by other institutions as a teaching and research tool.

Before joining Princeton, Dr. Cook was the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics and director of the W.M. Keck Center for Computational Discrete Optimization at Rice University. He also spent six years in industry with Bell Communications Research. Before that he was an associate professor at Columbia University; a visiting associate professor at Universit