OR Society announces Lyn Thomas Impact Award

The OR Society has just announced a new award, to be named in honour of Lyn Thomas, Professor of Management Science at Southampton from 2000-16.

The Lyn Thomas [Impact] Medal will awarded annually for the academic OR research which best demonstrates both novelty and real-world impact, backed up by evidence.   Impact can be of many forms: societal, economic, cultural, political, quality of life, etc.   The underpinning research should have been undertaken in the previous ten years and the impact itself must be demonstrable within the past two years. The award will be presented at the Society's annual Blackett Lecture.

Lyn, recognised internationally as one of the UK’s leading OR researchers of his generation, sadly passed away on July 14, 2016, a few weeks before his 70th birthday.  His own research was highly impactful. He was author of several seminal textbooks and over 200 journal papers and was instrumental in advancing both the analytical modelling techniques used by credit risk modellers and in bringing new industry challenges to the attention of academia.