Mark E. Lewis (engineer)

Mark Edwin Lewis (born 1970) is an American industrial engineer and professor at Cornell University. He was the first African-American faculty member hired in Industrial Engineering at University of Michigan and the first tenured African-American faculty member at the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University.^[1] Lewis' research is focused on stochastic processes, and queueing theory and Markov decision processes in particular.^[2]

Education

Lewis received a BS degree in mathematics and a BA degree in political science at Eckerd College, graduating in 1992.^[3] He proceeded to earn an MS degree in theoretical statistics from Florida State University in 1995 and a PhD degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech in 1998.^[2] Lewis' PhD thesis Bias Optimality in a Two-Class Nonstationary Queueing System^[4] at Georgia Tech was advised by Robert E. Foley.^[5]

Career

After his PhD, Lewis spent a year at the University of British Columbia as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1999, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as Assistant Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering.^[3][6] Lewis became Associate Professor at the Operations Research and Information Engineering department at Cornell University in 2005 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2011.^[2]

Lewis founded the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Minority Issues Forum in 2001 and served as its first president.^[7] In 2009, Lewis co-chaired the 15th INFORMS Applied Probability Conference at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.^[8][9] Lewis acted as chair of the Applied Probability Society from 2012 to 2014.^[10][11]

Lewis was Associate Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development for Cornell University's College of Engineering from 2015 to 2020.^[12][13] In this role, he acted as task force chair of the Faculty Diversity Committee, which was convened in 2017.^[14] Lewis served as principal investigator on the Cornell University Engineering Success Program to increase the participation of underrepresented minority and first-generation college students.^[15][16]

Research

Lewis researches the optimal control of non-stationary systems, developing policies for admission and pricing at non-stationary queueing systems with finite capacity and multiple customer classes, with applications in production, communication, and the airline industry.^[17]

He studied the dynamic control and optimal resource allocation of service systems, such as call centers, through "upgrades, reneging, and retrials" (for example after market segmentation).^[18]

Lewis also develops methods for optimization of Markov decision processes to study problems such as inventory control and revenue management.^[19]

Awards and honors

• 1998: NSF NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship^[20]
• 1999: Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) award, Georgia Tech^[21][22]
• 1999: Honorable Mention for George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences^[23]
• 2002: NSF CAREER^[24]
• 2003: Mentor of the Year, Sloan Foundation^[25]
• 2004: Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award, University of Michigan^[26]
• 2005: NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[27][28]
• 2014: MAA-NAM Blackwell Lecture^[29][30][31]
• 2019: Mathematically Gifted & Black 2019 Black History Month Honoree^[1]
• 2021: INFORMS Fellow^[32][33]
• 2021: INFORMS Minority Issues Forum Fellow^[34]

References

External links

• Mark E. Lewis publications indexed by Google Scholar
• "Operations Research and Information Engineering - Mark E. Lewis". Cornell University, Operations Research and Information Engineering. Retrieved 2020-03-30.
• "Mark E. Lewis, Professor". Cornell University, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. Retrieved 2020-03-30.

This page was last edited on 11 April 2024, at 15:48