Dr. Brenda L. Dietrich

Vice President of the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, she is an IBM Fellow (one of 67 worldwide and one of only 199 since IBM's founding). She was recognized for her influence and involvement in professional organizations, government agencies, and academia which have made IBM a leader in applying mathematics to business. She holds a B.S. degree in Mathematics from University of North Carolina (UNC) (1980); an M.S. degree (1983) and Ph.D. in Operations Research/Information Engineering from Cornell (1985). Her personal research includes manufacturing scheduling and services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality. Since joining IBM in 1984 she has worked with numerous business units, applying analytics to decision processes. She led Mathematical Sciences in IBM Research for over a decade. In 2007, she was the 13th President of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). She is also an INFORMS Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She has been a member of the INFORMS Roundtable, served on the INFORMS Board as Vice President for Practice, was Chair of the Advisory Committee for the first two Practice meetings. She was a member of the editorial board of Management and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) and is currently on the editorial board of Logistics Research Quarterly. As President of INFORMS she established the strategic planning process, and participated in the launch of the Analytics online magazine. She brings a business perspective to projects. She is a founding member of COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR), the open source repository for OR software, which provides the project access to the world's largest repository of free Operations Research and Industrial Engineering computer-based tools. She currently leads the emerging technologies team in the IBM Watson group. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the IE/MS department of Northwestern University, a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for both the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA, U. of Minnesota) and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science,(DIMACS at Rutgers), and IBM?s delegate to MIT?s Supply Chain 2020 program. She has twice been named one of IBM's top inventors; holding 13 patents and has 20 patents applied for. She co-authored numerous publications, and co-edited the book, ?Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets?.