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Richard
C. Larson, Ph.D.
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and
Engineering Systems, MIT
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Dr.
Larson received his Ph.D. from MIT.
The
majority of his career has focused on operations research
as applied to services industries. He is author, co-author
or editor of six books and author of over 75 scientific
articles, primarily in the fields of technology-enabled
education, urban service systems (esp. emergency response
systems), queueing, logistics and workforce planning. His
first book, Urban Police Patrol Analysis (MIT Press,
1972) was awarded the Lanchester
Prize of the Operations Research Society of America
(ORSA). He is co-author, with Amedeo Odoni, of Urban
Operations Research, Prentice Hall, 1981.
He
served as President of ORSA, (1993-4), and is currently
President-elect of INFORMS,
INstitute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
He has served as consultant to the World Bank, Coca-Cola,
Johnson Controls, EDS, United Artists Cinemas, Union Carbide
Corp., Rand Corp., the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement
of Science, Predictive Networks, WebCT, Hibernia College
in Ireland, Hong Kong University and the U.S. Department
of Justice. With outside companies on which he serves as
board member, most recently Structured
Decisions Corporation, Dr. Larson has undertaken major
projects with Citibank, American Airlines, Actmedia/Turner
Broadcasting, the U.S. Postal Service, the City of New York,
Jenny Craig, Conagra, Diebold, BOC and other firms and organizations.
Dr. 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 national media (e.g., ABC TV's 20/20).
Dr. Larson has served as Co-Director of the MIT
Operations Research Center (over 15 years in that post).
Dr. Larson was first listed in Who's Who in America in 1982.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and
is an INFORMS Founding Fellow. He has been honored with
the INFORMS President's Award and the Kimball Medal.
From
1995 to mid 2003, Dr. Larson served as Director of MIT's
CAES, Center for Advanced Educational Services. Dr. Larson's
position at CAES focused on bringing technology-enabled
learning to students living on the traditional campus and
to those living and working far from the university, perhaps
on different continents. During the years 1995 - 1999 he
built the center from two to seven business units, encompassing
MIT's production and R&D capabilities in educational
technologies and its two major lifelong learning academic
programs. His center produced the world's most ambitious
point-to-point distance learning program, the Singapore
MIT Alliance. 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 has served as Principal Investigator of several of MIT's
most ambitious technology-enabled learning programs, including
PIVoT
-- the web-based the
Physics Interactive Video Tutor, Masters'
Voices (sponsored by the Ford Motor Company), MIT
World, "Inventing the Global Classroom," "Good
Clinical Practices" and "Fungal
Infections" (the last two sponsored by the Pfizer
Corporation). Recently he held the first-ever meeting of
LINC,
Learning International Networks Consortium, an MIT-based
international project that he is currently building. Dr.
Larson also serves as founding co-director of the Forum
the Internet and the University, a not-for-profit organization
affiliated with the Forum for the Future of Higher Education.
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