Past Awards
L. Robin Keller has been making substantial contributions to the operations research profession for over twenty-five years. After earning her M.B.A. and PhD from the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, where she was voted the Outstanding Doctoral Graduate, she joined the University of California, Irvine faculty in 1982, and is currently a Professor of Operations & Decision Technologies and Associate Dean at The Paul Merage School of Business. At UCI, she served as the Doctoral Program Director, Associate Dean for Research, and Area Coordinator. She has been a visiting professor at Duke and UCLA.
Dr. Keller was a program director for two years and a panel member for the NSF Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program, supervising the research funding awards for Operations Research. She also examined risks involved in NSF’s responsibility for U.S. scientific efforts in Antarctica.
Dr. Keller is widely recognized for her decision analysis research leadership. She is the incoming Editor-in-Chief for Decision Analysis. She served as the Decision Analysis Department Editor and Associate Editor of Management Science, and currently is on a number of editorial boards. She also chaired the editorial review committee for Organization Science in 1992. Her decision analysis research spans the areas of creative problem structuring, multiple attribute decisions, probability biases, perceived risk, and planning protection against terrorism, environmental, health, and safety risks.
Dr. Keller was elected a full member of ORSA in 1985 and a Fellow of INFORMS in 2004.
Dr. Keller made many service contributions to our profession. She has been particularly involved with the Decision Analysis Society, as Council Member, Chair-elect, Chair, and Past President. (She is a Past President who didn’t serve as President, since the Chair job was subsequently renamed President.) She led the effort to found the Decision Analysis journal which began publication in 2004, and she chaired the journal’s first editor search.
She served as Council member and Vice President-Finance of TIMS and chaired its Investment Committee. She was very involved in the planning and execution of the TIMS/ORSA merger, with her VP-Finance job as the Board member in charge of the TIMS budget, operations and office staff. As chair of the Cost-Benefit Subcommittee to Evaluate the Merger, she led an effort to construct a multiple objective decision analysis model to aid in the merger planning process, as described in her paper with Craig Kirkwood in Operations Research. Following the merger, she was a founding Director-at-large of INFORMS overseeing education initiatives and served on the NSF Liaison Committee. She also was a candidate for INFORMS President.
For her many contributions to the field of operations research, and for her distinguished service, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences expresses its sincere appreciation by awarding the 2006 George E. Kimball Medal to L. Robin Keller.