Brenda L. Dietrich

Vice President of the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Brenda L. Dietrich was an IBM Fellow (one of 67 worldwide and one of only 199 since IBM's founding). She was recognized for her influence and involvement in professional organizations, government agencies, and academia, which made IBM a leader in applying mathematics to business. She held a B.S. degree in Mathematics from University of North Carolina (UNC) (1980), an M.S. degree (1983), and a Ph.D. in Operations Research/Information Engineering from Cornell (1985).

Her personal research included manufacturing scheduling and services resource management, transportation logistics, integer programming, and combinatorial duality. After joining IBM in 1984, she worked with numerous business units, applying analytics to decision processes, and led Mathematical Sciences in IBM Research for over a decade. Dietrich subsequently led the emerging technologies team in the IBM Watson group, bringing a business perspective to projects.

In 2007, she served as the 13th President of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). As President of INFORMS, Dietrich established the strategic planning process and participated in the launch of the Analytics online magazine. She was also an INFORMS Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

She had been a member of the INFORMS Roundtable, served on the INFORMS Board as Vice President for Practice, and was Chair of the Advisory Committee for the first two Practice meetings. Dietrich was a member of the editorial board of Management and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) and served on the editorial board of Logistics Research Quarterly. She was a founding member of COmputational INfrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR), the open source repository for OR software, which provided the project access to the world's largest repository of free Operations Research and Industrial Engineering computer-based tools.

She was a member of the Advisory Board of the IE/MS department of Northwestern University, a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for both the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA, U. of Minnesota) and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS at Rutgers), and IBM's delegate to MIT's Supply Chain 2020 program. Dietrich was twice named one of IBM's top inventors, holding 13 patents with 20 additional patents applied for. She co-authored numerous publications and co-edited the book "Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets".