Tamás Terlaky has been appointed as the Alcoa Foundation Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, effective January 1, 2024, in recognition of his accomplishments and contributions to the Lehigh Engineering community.
Established in the 1960s by the Alcoa Foundation, this professorship was founded in honor of Joseph W. Richards (Class of 1886), who earned the first PhD granted by Lehigh and later joined the university faculty.
Terlaky joined the Lehigh faculty in 2008 and served as chair of the ISE department until 2017. He is a director of Lehigh’s Quantum Computing and Optimization Lab, providing fundamental expertise in interior-point methods, quantum computing optimization, perceptron-like algorithms, and high-performance computational optimization algorithms.
Terlaky's research interests include high-performance optimization methods, optimization models, algorithms and software, and solving optimization problems in engineering sciences.
His research in high-performance computing includes imaging of cancerous tumors and how to radiate the tumor in the most effective way. Terlaky harnesses algorithms to optimize core refueling of nuclear reactors, the radiation effectiveness in cancer treatment, the maintenance scheduling of oil refineries, and more.
He is founding editor-in-chief of Optimization and Engineering and serves as associate editor of seven journals. He is a Fellow of the Fields Institute (Toronto), INFORMS, SIAM, IFORRS, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering and has received numerous honors including the H. Wagner Prize (INFORMS), the Outstanding Innovation in Service Systems Engineering (IISE), and the Award of Merit of the Canadian Operational Research Society. Terlaky serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, and recently served as vice president of INFORMS and chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization.
