William J. Cook, Chandler Family Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was elected INFORMS Fellow at the 2010 INFORMS annual meeting in Austin, Texas, in November.

The INFORMS Fellow Award is reserved for distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in operations research and the management sciences. Their service to the profession and to INFORMS has culminated in election to the INFORMS Fellow Award.

Cook, known widely for his work with the Traveling Salesman Problem and his research in combinatorial optimization and integer programming, was elected for his research contributions in both areas.  Cook is one of eleven Fellows elected this year.

In addition to his research interests in combinatorial optimization and integer programming, Cook is also heavily involved in research dealing with computational issues involved in treating hard discrete problems such as large instances for the celebrated traveling salesman problem.

Cook is the author or editor of seven books, the latest due out in 2011, and the current editor-in-chief of the Mathematical Programming Computation journal. His awards, in addition to his election as INFORMS Fellow, include the I.E. Block Community Lecturer prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming.

Cook joins a distinguished list, including the following twelve other ISyE faculty members who have achieved this recognition:

Dr. Jan Shi
Dr. John Bartholdi
Dr. Jim Dai
Dr. Augustine Esogbue
Dr. John Jarvis
Dr. Ellis Johnson
Dr. George Nemhauser
Dr. Donald Ratliff
Dr. William Rouse
Dr. Michael Thomas
Dr. Chelsea White III
Dr. Jeff Wu