Lawrence Wein awarded 2008 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize

Lawrence M. Wein, CISAC faculty member, has been awarded the 2008 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The prize is given for the best written contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the last three years.

Wein, a professor at the Graduate School of Business, was awarded the prize for a series of papers, including, "The Last Line of Defense: Designing Radiation Detection-Interdiction Systems to Protect Cities from a Nuclear Attack."

Wein's work opened up an important new area, homeland security, for the application of Operations Research. The work analyzes risks associated with four main national threats: border security, nuclear weapons at ports and large cities, anthrax- and smallpox-based attacks and food supply attacks, and it offers important policy recommendations for dealing with these risks. According to the award citation, Wein's research developed creative, original and detailed models for evaluating alternative methods of protection in these four areas. "The analysis used a range of methods including optimization, game theory, stochastic models, statistics and differential equations. Wein's research sets a high standard for future work on not only problems of security but public problems in general, and in communicating results of operations research to the general public," the citation stated."