Jim Dai, Edenfield Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), delivered the Markov Lecture at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ on October 15. The Markov Lecture is a prestigious honor bestowed by the Applied Probability Society (APS) of INFORMS with the intent to both honor the associated speaker and to bring to the APS membership topical work of the highest calibre in the discipline.

For the lecture, Dai discussed his project, “Stochastic Network Models for Hospital Inpatient Flow Management,” which he has been collaborating on for the last three years with Ph.D. student Pengyi Shi, who is jointly advised by Dai and Pinar Keskinocak, the Joseph C. Mello Professor in ISyE.  Other team members on the project include Ding Ding, from the University of International Business & Economics in Beijing, Jame Ang and Mabel Chou of the National University of Singapore, and Jin Xin and Joe Sim, with the National University Hospital.

Dai received B.A. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, all in mathematics. He is an elected fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has received a number of awards for his research contributions including The Best Publication Award in 1997 and The Erlang Prize in 1998, both from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS. He is currently an Area Editor and the Interim Editor-in-Chief for Mathematics of Operations Research, an Area Editor for Operations Research, and a past Series Editor for Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science. He was recently appointed by INFORMS to be the next Editor-in-Chief for Mathematics of Operations Research effective January 1, 2013.

The APS initiated the annual Markov Lecture in 2005, to be delivered at the INFORMS Annual Conference each year. The Markov Lecturer is selected by a committee consisting of the APS Prize Committee for the year in question and the APS track organizers involved in organizing that year's INFORMS conference.