Engineering Professor Receives Baker Career Research Award

Photo Submitted

Ronald Rardin

Ronald L. Rardin, Distinguished Professor of Industrial Engineering, is the 2012 recipient of the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers. Each year this award recognizes a single researcher for his or her contributions  to the field of industrial engineering over their career.

Rardin is John and Mary Lib White Systems Integration Chair at the University of Arkansas. He also heads the University of Arkansas Center on Innovation in Healthcare Logistics, targeting innovations in supply chain and material flow aspects of healthcare operations in collaboration with Wal-Mart, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the VHA hospital network, and other partners.

Rardin retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University after directing the Purdue Energy Modeling Research Groups and playing a leading role in Purdue's Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering. He also served a rotation from 2000-2003 as Program Director for Operations Research and Service Enterprise Engineering at the National Science Foundation including founding the program to foster research in service industries, especially healthcare.

Rardin obtained his B.A. and M.P.A. degrees from the University of Kansas, and after working in city government, consulting and distribution for five years, a doctoral degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His teaching and research interests have spanned a wide variety of issues in large-scale optimization modeling and algorithms, and their applications in energy planning, healthcare delivery and other important domains.

He is an award winning teacher of those topics, and co-author of numerous research papers and two comprehensive textbooks: an advanced graduate text Discrete Optimization, published in 1988, and a comprehensive undergraduate/graduate textbook on mathematical programming, Optimization in Operations Research, which was published in 1998 and received the Institute of Industrial Engineers Book of the Year award. He has also been honored as a Fellow of both the Institute of Industrial Engineers and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.