Ron Howard, Academic Chair
Professor, Management Science & Engineering
Stanford University
Dr. Howard has been at Stanford since 1965. His books on DA, probabilistic modeling, dynamic programming, and Markov processes serve as major references for courses and research in these fields. His experience as a practitioner ranges over numerous fields of application, including projects on investment planning, research strategy, hurricane seeding, and nuclear waste isolation. Dr. Howard is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Operations Research Society of America’s Frank P. Ramsey Medal in 1986 and the first INFORMS Teaching of Operations Research/Management Science Practice award in 1998. In 2014, the Society of Decision Professionals named the Raiffa-Howard Award for Organizational Decision Quality in honor of Prof. Ron Howard and Prof. Howard Raiffa of Harvard University, who together are widely considered co-founders of the discipline in 1964.