Awards Releases

INFORMS, the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, analytics, AI and data science, has awarded the 2026 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research to a team of researchers from Amazon. 

INFORMS announced that Aharon Ben-Tal of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Theory Prize, one of the organization’s highest honors. 

INFORMS has announced that James J. Cochran and Enver Yücesan have each been awarded the 2026 George E. Kimball Medal, honoring their decades of distinguished service and transformative contributions to the field of operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS).

INFORMS has announced that Vera Traub and Jens Vygen have been awarded the 2026 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for their book, “Approximation Algorithms for Traveling Salesman Problems,” published by Cambridge University Press.  

INFORMS has named Ruth J. Williams, a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division and a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, as the recipient of the 2026 INFORMS President’s Award.  

INFORMS has awarded Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) its 2026 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, for reengineering how global cloud infrastructure is planned and delivered, applying advanced analytics and AI to orchestrate complex fulfillment decisions across its rapidly expanding data center network.

INFORMS has awarded Microsoft, a global leader in cloud computing and technology solutions, the 2026 INFORMS Prize. This prestigious award recognizes Microsoft’s use of advanced analytics and O.R. to optimize its end-to-end cloud infrastructure and capacity management to deliver best-in-class efficiency, scalability and reliability.

INFORMS has awarded the 2026 UPS George D. Smith Prize to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). The award recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of O.R. and analytics.

INFORMS has awarded the INFORMS Early Career Practitioner Award to Athanasios (Thanos) Lolos, principal data scientist at Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU), for his outstanding contributions in applying operations research and advanced analytics to real-world financial challenges. 

The Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and the U.S. Military Academy are recognized for excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of operations research, analytics and data science.