Short Biography

Karla Hoffman is a Professor in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department of the School of Information Technology and Engineering of George Mason University where she had been Chair for five years ending in 2001.  Previously, she worked as a mathematician in the Operations Research Department of the Center for Applied Mathematics of the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she served as a senior consultant to a variety of government agencies.  She received her BS in mathematics from Rutgers University in1969, and an M.B.A. and a D.Sc. in Operations Research from the George Washington University in 1971 and 1975, respectively. 

AWARDS:
National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST) Applied Research Award, Commerce Department Silver Medal, George Mason University's Distinguished Faculty Award(1989), The Volgenau School of Engineering Outstanding Research Award (2010), and the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Kimball Medal (2005) and Harvey Greenberg Service Award (2009) and the Omega Rho Plenary Speaker (2008). She is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences. She has given multiple plenary talks for INFORMS and its associated Optimization and Computing Societies, for the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) and for the EURO Conference in Pozdam. She was part of a team that won the 2018 Edelman Prize for their work on the FCC Spectrum Incentive Auction;

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES:
Dr. Hoffman served as President of INFORMS in 1999 and is currently on the Administrative Council of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (IFORS) as the Vice President of the North American Operations Research Societies. She has served on the Boards of INFORMS, The Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), and The Mathematical Programming Society. She has served as Treasurer and Secretary of the Parkinson Foundation of the National Capital Area.

RESEARCH AREAS:
Dr. Hoffman's primary areas of research are combinatorial optimization and auction design and applications. She consults to the Federal Communication Commission on auction design and testing. She has consulted to multiple federal agencies including DOT, DOE, NASA, and DHS. She has consulted to a variety of corporations on the routing and scheduling of ships, trucks and buses. Including U.S. Airways, Delta Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and American Airlines on fleet assignment and crew-scheduling problems. She has worked with the Disney Corporation and Florida Rock Industries and GrubHub on real-time scheduling. She has served as a consultant on combinatorial optimization problems for telecommunications, transportation, postal services and military organizations and has consulted on auction design related to telecommunications. She has served on the editorial boards of:ÊAnnals of Operations Research, Computational Optimization and its Applications, Information Systems Frontiers, INFORMS Journal on Computing and the SIAM Journal on Optimization.