Tom Magnanti has been appointed President of the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore’s so-called “fourth university”. Tom, of course, is one of the preeminent researchers and administrators in operations research. He has written lots of influential papers and books. His book with Bradly and Hax on Applied Mathematical Programming had a huge effect on me (take that Russ Ackoff) and is the sort of book the field badly needs now.
Tom was President of INFORMS while I was on the Board (he was President two before me, so we had some pretty in-depth interactions) and he was President of IFORS when I joined that board. I know him well and he is a heck of a nice (and effective!) guy.
The new university is an exciting operation: what would you do if you were given free reign to create a top-notch engineering and design school from scratch? Tom, with his experience as Dean of Engineering at MIT, is a fantastic choice to lead this endeavor. It is great to have an operations researcher in charge, and Tom is another example of operations research as a path to administrative success.