In 2008, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) established the Distinguished Lecture Series to promote discussion on critical issues in the fields of industrial and systems engineering by bringing in prominent scholars and business leaders who engage and share their expertise with students, faculty, and alumni.

In 2018, thanks to a generous gift from LeeAnn and Walter Muller, it became the LeeAnn and Walter Muller Distinguished Lecture Series.

Walter J. Muller retired in 2017 after a 27-year career at Bank of America. In 2007, he was appointed chief investment officer for Bank of America, after serving as a quantitative finance executive where he supported the bank’s quantitative finance efforts for its corporate treasury and risk management departments. Walter served as chief investment officer for 10 years.

He graduated from Benedictine Military School in 1975 and earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in economics from the University of Georgia. In 1983, he received a Ph.D. in applied economics and finance from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. LeeAnn has a BBA and an MBA, both from the University of Georgia.

The Mullers currently reside in Atlanta, and their daughter, Grace, is a first-year ISyE student.

The speaker for ISyE’s 2019 LeeAnn and Walter Muller Distinguished Lecture was Stanford University’s M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell. Paté-Cornell presented “Cyber Risk Analysis: Three Aspects of Model Formulation in Support of Risk Management.”

She is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering and was the founding chair of the department of management science and engineering (MS&E) at Stanford University (2000-2011).  She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Paté-Cornell’s specialty is engineering risk analysis, with applications to complex systems (space, medical, offshore oil platforms, etc.). Her research has focused on the optimization of warning systems and on the inclusion of human and organizational factors in the analysis of systems’ failure risks. Her recent work is on the use of game theory in risk analysis, with applications that include counterterrorism, nuclear counter-proliferation, and cyber security. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the French Académie des Technologies, the Naval Post-Graduate School Advisory Board, the NASA Advisory Council, and Draper Laboratory Corporation.

She holds a B.S. in mathematics and physics, Marseille (France), an engineering degree (applied math/CS) from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France), an M.S. in operations research and a Ph.D. in engineering-economic systems, both from Stanford University. She was an assistant professor of civil engineering at MIT (1978–1981), a faculty member, then chair, of the department of industrial engineering and engineering management (IE-EM) at Stanford University, before chairing the new department of MS&E.