news
In Memoriam: Shabbir Ahmed
Primary tabs
Shabbir Ahmed, the Anderson-Interface Chair and professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), passed away on June 19, 2019. Ahmed was a valued ISyE faculty member who made important contributions to optimization theory, methodology, and applications.
“Shabbir was a leader in both ISyE and the optimization community and will be remembered for the significant impact he made in his field. He had a brilliant research and teaching career, but more importantly, he was a dear friend and a generous colleague,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “He was taken from us far too soon, and he will be missed.”
In particular, Ahmed led the way in integrating two challenging methodologies – stochastic and integer programming – that are essential for solving problems in energy distribution, supply chain, transportation, and finance. His most-cited paper, “A Stochastic Programming Approach for Supply Chain Network Design under Certainty,” has over 960 citations on Google Scholar. This was the first paper that designed methodology for solving large-scale stochastic supply chain design problems with a huge number of scenarios by integrating the sample average approximation scheme with an accelerated Benders decomposition algorithm.
From the earliest days of his academic career, Ahmed won accolades for his groundbreaking ideas. He received the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award (2000) and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (2002).
Ahmed joined ISyE in 2000, where recognition of his accomplishments continued. He received the IBM Faculty Award in both 2002 and 2005, the 2017 INFORMS Computing Society Prize, and the 2018 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. In 2014 he was appointed both as an ISyE Stewart Faculty Fellow and a College of Engineering Dean’s Professor. He was a Senior Member of IEEE and an INFORMS Fellow.
“Shabbir’s expertise had both depth and breadth,” noted A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser, who worked closely with Ahmed on optimizing inventory and logistics problems. “He could work in so many areas, and his impact was large as a result. While some people are experts in theory and others in application, Shabbir put it all together.”
In addition to academic rigor, Ahmed was regarded as a gracious collaborator and mentor. Over the course of his career, Ahmed advised a number of award-winning undergraduate Senior Design teams, as well as 26 Ph.D. students, including current student Beste Basciftci.
“As Professor Ahmed’s Ph.D. student, I was very fortunate to have the unique opportunity and honor to work with him since beginning my graduate work in 2015,” Basciftci said. “I remember my excitement the day I was accepted to the ISyE Ph.D. program and Professor Ahmed contacted me for research opportunities in his group. He was a brilliant advisor, mentor, and role model. He was a preeminent leader in operations research, and he will be missed dearly.”
“His personal impact on me was profound, first as a professor and then later as a colleague, and he was instrumental in my coming back to ISyE,” said Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Alejandro Toriello, who completed his Ph.D. at ISyE and co-authored his first graduate paper with Ahmed. “Shabbir was incredibly generous with his time, and for such a star, he was so humble and so kind.”
Ahmed earned a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 1993, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and 2000, respectively.
He was devoted to his family and is survived by his wife, Rasha, and two daughters, Raeeva and Umana.
ISyE has established a graduate fellowship in Ahmed’s honor. If you are interested in contributing to this fellowship’s endowment, please contact ISyE Director of Development Nancy Sandlin at nancy.sandlin@isye.gatech.edu or 404.385.7458.
Additionally, Distressed Children & Infants International is an organization dear to Ahmed and his family, and a contribution to this organization in Ahmed’s honor would be greatly appreciated.
Memories
“Shabbir was typically the earliest faculty member to arrive at ISyE each morning. When I was first hired at Georgia Tech, I thought that if such a successful and well-established scientist showed up that early, I should probably show up even earlier! I gave up the day I arrived on campus at 6 AM and saw that Shabbir was already here. He was not only an excellent scholar but also one of the nicest people I have ever met. He was very kind about sharing his time with everyone, especially junior faculty. He made a big impact on many of us.”
- Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and associate professor, ISyE
- Dimitris Bertsimas, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor, MIT Operations Research Center
- Jeff Caimano, financial manager, ISyE
- Lisa Cox, HR administrative manager, ISyE
- Santanu Dey, associate professor, ISyE
- Nagi Gebraeel, Georgia Power Early Career Professor and professor, ISyE
- Yongpei Guan, professor, University of Florida
- Qie He, assistant professor, University of Minnesota
- Xiaoming Huo, A. Russell Chandler III Professor, ISyE
- Ruiwei Jiang, assistant professor, University of Michigan
- R. Gary Parker, professor emeritus, ISyE
- Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Early Career Professor and associate professor, ISyE
- Nick Sahinidis, John E. Swearingen Professor, Carnegie Mellon
- Andrew Schaefer, Noah Harding Chair and professor, Rice University
- Siqian Shen, associate professor, University of Michigan
- Matias Siebert Sandoval, Ph.D. student, ISyE
- Cole Smith, associate provost for academic initiatives, Clemson University
- Weijun Xie, assistant professor, Virginia Tech
- Yulian Zeng, technology analyst, Morgan Stanley
- Chen Zhou, associate chair for undergraduate studies and associate professor, ISyE
Groups
Status
- Workflow Status: Published
- Created By: Shelley Wunder-Smith
- Created: 07/01/2019
- Modified By: Shelley Wunder-Smith
- Modified: 07/10/2019
Categories
Keywords
Target Audience