PROFILE OF PROFESSOR RICHARD LARSON

Prof. Larson received his Ph.D. from MIT where he is Mitsui Professor in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD). He is founding Director of the Center for Engineering System Fundamentals http://cesf.mit.edu, founding Director of MIT LINC http://linc.mit.edu and Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS http://blossoms.mit.edu. His major career has focused on operations research as applied to service industries. He served as President of ORSA, (1993-4), and INFORMS (2005), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. With Structured Decisions Corporation, Prof Larson has undertaken major projects with the U.S. Postal Service, Citibank, American Airlines, the City of New York, Conagra, Diebold, BOC and other firms and organizations. Prof. Larson’s research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques (e.g., the Queue Inference Engine and the Hypercube Queueing Model), but has also been covered extensively in the national media. Prof. Larson served as Co-Director of the MIT Operations Research Center (over 15 years in that post). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is an INFORMS Founding Fellow.

From 1995 to mid 2003, Prof. Larson served as Director of MIT’s CAES, Center for Advanced Educational Services. Prof. Larson’s position at CAES focused on bringing technology-enabled learning to students living and working far from the university, perhaps on different continents. He has been invited to give lectures on the future of technology-enabled education in testimony before the House Committee on Science (Washington, D.C.) and in North and South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. He was founder, with Glenn Strehle, of MIT World. http://mitworld.mit.edu. He is founding Director of LINC, Learning International Networks Consortium, an MIT-based international project that has held five international symposia and sponsored a number of initiatives in Africa, China and the Middle East. He recently
started LINC’s newest and largest initiative, BLOSSOMS, Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math.