Operations Research: Models are Us!
Richard C. Larson – Mitsui Professor, Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We utilize eight years of scientific workforce research, supported by NIH, to demonstrate the need for OR professionals to remember their roots, first planted in the 1940s and 1950s: big insights can come from simple models; OR is more a branch of physics than mathematics; modeling can take many forms; and communication with decision-makers and “the press” must be in straightforward, easy-to-understand language. Model creation often involves creative lateral thinking and even metaphors, in addition to the usual scientific process of observation, data collection and testing. Using our general framing of OR in this “old-fashioned way,” we provide overviews of five different modeling studies we performed for NIH. The topics include (1) the effects on annual openings for assistant professorships of the lack of a mandatory retirement age for tenured professors; (2) the causes of significant year-to-year fluctuations in available funds for new multi-year research grants; (3) the need for “birth control” to deal with the “children” of faculty, namely, faculty-supervised PhDs; (4) the national STEM crisis, or lack thereof; and (5) the perpetual queue of postdoctoral fellows waiting for assistant professorship offers. We conclude with general reflections, including a personal note related to one of the authors.
Dr. Larson is Mitsui Professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He served as founding director of MIT LINC http://linc.mit.edu and is Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS http://blossoms.mit.edu. His career has focused on operations research as applied to services industries (urban service systems, queueing, logistics, disaster management, disease dynamics, dynamic pricing of critical infrastructures, education and workforce planning). He served as President of ORSA and INFORMS. Dr. Larson’s research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques, but has also been covered extensively in the media.
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