Balachandran Vaidyanathan Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, 303 Weil Hall, Gainesville, Florida 32611 (vbalaufl.edu). Mr. Vaidyanathan is a doctoral candidate. He received his B.S. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2002. His interests include mathematical modeling and the design of algorithms to solve real-world problems. He has been awarded Honorable Mentions in the INFORMS 2004 and 2006 paper competition on Management Science in Railroad Applications sponsored by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. In addition to application-oriented research, Mr. Vaidyanathan is also conducting research on developing algorithms for a special case of assignment and transportation problems, which has wide application to transportation networks.

Krishna C. Jha Innovative Scheduling, Inc., 2153 S.E. Hawthorne Road, Suite 128, Gainesville, Florida 32641. Dr. Jha is a director of research and development at Innovative Scheduling, Inc., specializing in mathematical modeling, state-of-the-art optimization techniques, algorithmic design and development, and software engineering. During his doctoral studies, he developed innovative very-large-scale neighborhood search algorithms for several combinatorial optimization problems. Dr. Jha is the recipient of the first prize in the INFORMS 2003 paper competition on Management Science in Railroad Applications, and the INFORMS 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for excellence in operations research practice.

Ravindra K. Ahuja Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, 303 Weil Hall, Gainesville, Florida 32611 (ahujaufl.edu). Professor Ahuja is co-director of the Supply Chain and Logistics Engineering Center at the University of Florida, and president and CEO of Innovative Scheduling, Inc. He received his Ph.D. degree in industrial and management engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He visited the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to conduct research on the development of faster algorithms for network flow problems, a collaboration that resulted in the fastest available algorithms for most fundamental network flow problems and led to his coauthoring Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications. In 1993 this book won the prestigious Lanchester Prize, awarded annually to the best publication in operations research. Dr. Ahuja is also a coauthor of two books on developing decision-support systems; he publishes widely and is an associate editor of Transportation Science and Networks. He won the INFORMS 2003 Pierskalla Award for best contribution of operations research in health applications, and the INFORMS 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Award for excellence in operations research practice.