John Bartholdi, Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), along with Don Eisenstein (MS IE 1983, PhD IE 1992) professor at the University of Chicago, have been awarded the 2012 TSL Best Paper Prize for their paper, "A self-coordinating bus route to avoid bus bunching."  The two were recognized at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting which was held in Phoenix, AZ October 14-17.

The TSL Best Paper Award is given every year to an outstanding paper in the field of transportation science and logistics. The paper must have been published in a refereed journal and must present innovative approaches for solving complex problems in transportation and/or logistics, with an emphasis on operations research and quantitative methods.

Bartholdi, also the research director for The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL) at Georgia Tech, teaches supply chain issues, primarily warehousing, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and in SCL's professional education program. His research centers on problems in warehousing and distribution, but he reserves some time to pursue wider-ranging interests, including mechanics, politics, computer science, geography, and biology.

Bartholdi graduated in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Florida and then served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia as a paratrooper in a Naval Special Warfare unit. He returned to the University of Florida to complete the Ph.D. program in operations research in 1977 and later served on the faculties at the University of Michigan, the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering, and the National University of Singapore. Bartholdi was named a "Presidential Young Investigator" by the National Science Foundation for 1984-1989. His research work has been supported by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, among others.