Resnick named new director of OR&IE, effective July 1

By David Brand

Sid Resnick, a professor in Cornell's School of Operations Research andIndus-trial Engineering (OR&IE), has been named director of the school. Hisfive-year term begins July 1.

Resnick, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1987, will succeed acting director Leslie Trotter Jr., professor of OR&IE.

Making the announcement, John Hopcroft, dean of the College ofEngineer-ing, said, "I believe that there are major opportunities for OR&IEin financial engineering, engineering management, systems engineering andinformation technology and that the next year or two will be critical forthe school in setting its directions. I am very pleased that Sid is willingto take on this task and look forward to working with him and the facultyin OR&IE."

Hopcroft thanked Trotter for serving as acting director during the pastyear. "He has done an outstanding job of moving the department forward. Iknow that Sid will continue to build on the work Les has begun, and I amconfident that the school is well-positioned to take on the new challengesoffered by the changing needs in engineering education."

Resnick, who currently is on sabbatical leave, commented on hisappointment: "We will be expanding and maintaining the traditional areas ofexcellence of our school as well as exploring opportunities and directionsfor OR&IE in financial engineering, engineering management, systemsengineering and information technology."

The incumbent director obtained his B.S. at Queens College, CityUniversity of New York, in 1966 and both his M.A. (1968) and his Ph.D.(1970) at Purdue University.

Resnick joined the Cornell faculty after nine years at ColoradoState University, six years at Stanford University and two years at theTechnion, Israel. He also has held visiting appointments at the Universityof Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Mathematics Center; the Australian NationalUniversity and CSIRO, Canberra; the Technion, as a Lady Davis Fellow;Sussex University, England, as a science and engineering Research Councilfellow; Erasmus University, the Netherlands; and ETH, Switzerland.

Resnick is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics,and while at Colorado State he was an Oliver Pennock Distinguished ServiceAward winner. He was on the Bernoulli Society Committee for Conferences inStochastic Processes and was on the program committee of the First WorldCongress of the Bernoulli Society in Toshkent, Uzbekistan.

He is a founding associate editor of Annals of Applied Probability and a current associate editor of Journal of Applied Probability,Stochastic Models, Stochastic Processes and Their Applications and TheMathematical Scientist.

He served a three-year term on the Council of theInstitute of Mathematical Statistics and currently serves on its fellows committee.

His current research concentrates on probability modeling, withemphasis on heavy-tailed analysis, a topic of current interest whenexplaining network measurement data in telecommunications.

While on sabbatical,he has been spending half of the spring semester at AT&T Research on acooperative research program in the mathematical sciences, half funded byAT&T Research and half by the National Science Foundation. The project title is"Inference and performance problems related to high variability phenomenain measured data network traffic."

Resnick is the author or coauthor of approximately 125 research articlesand has authored three books, the most recent of which isA Probability Path (1998, Birkhauser, Boston).