Michael Trick, dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is the recipient of the INFORMS Journal on Computing Test of Time Award. Trick, along with co-author Anuj Mehrotra, were given the award for the 1996 research article, “A column generation approach for graph coloring.” Mehrotra is now the dean and Stephen P. Zelnak Jr. Chair at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business.
The Test of Time Award is given to research papers published in the INFORMS Journal on Computing that were landmark discoveries in the field of operations research and computing, and continue to be important references for researchers today. Trick, who has been a Carnegie Mellon University faculty member since 1989, is an award-winning researcher in operations research, with a specialization in computational methods of optimization.
In the announcement, Alice E. Smith, editor-in-chief of INFORMS Journal on Computing, praised Trick and Mehrotra for their elegant solution to a notoriously difficult problem:
“The paper is beautifully written, developing and explaining difficult concepts in branch-cut-and-price methodology in an easy-to-grasp setting. Their elegant work has long served as an important template in the application of linear programming techniques to the solution of difficult optimization models. It will continue to do so for years to come.”
Trick thanked the journal for the award: “My co-author and I deeply appreciate this recognition for work we did nearly 30 years ago,” he said. “This paper was the result of years of discussion, problem solving, testing and more problem solving. At its heart, research is about finding solutions, and it brings me great satisfaction that our approach has helped others find solutions to their own research questions.”
Trick is the author of more than fifty professional publications and is the editor of six volumes of refereed articles. He has consulted extensively with the United States Postal Service on supply chain design, with Major League Baseball and a number of college basketball conferences on scheduling issues, and with telecommunications organizations on bandwidth allocation. He was part of the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) team that received the 2018 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research, and Management Science.
