IISE Operations Research (OR) Division Teaching Award

The IISE Operations Research (OR) division is accepting applications for the Teaching Excellence Award, an annual national award recognizing excellence in teaching OR. If you are interested in this award, you can ask your supervisor (e.g., department chair) to nominate you. The award will be presented at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2023 (May 20 -23).

Eligibility criteria

  • The candidate must be a member of IISE and the OR division.
  • The candidate should be nominated for the instruction of an undergraduate course in operations research methods or applications. The course must be offered as part of an academic program in engineering or management (i.e., Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, or Civil Engineering, or Management Science among others). Examples of course titles for the nomination may include “Operations Research,” “Linear Programming,” “Optimization Methods,” “Simulation,” “Production Systems,” “Linear Optimization,” “Decision Analysis,” etc.
  • Course materials for which they are being recognized must have been developed by the candidate.
  • We welcome nominations from around the globe! Course materials and nomination documents must be in English.

Nomination Package

Nominations may be made by a faculty colleague or a student who has taken the course from the candidate. The nomination package must consist of:

  • Table of contents (up to 2 pages).
  • Letters of support from the nominator and 2 other individuals (up to 2 pages for each letter). At least one of the letters must be from a faculty member and one of the letters from a student who has taken the course for which the individual is nominated. The letters should completely focus on the course and its impact on students that the faculty is being nominated for.
  • A course syllabus and samples of course materials (up to 20 pages).
  • Curriculum vitae of the candidate (up to 2 pages).
  • A reflective statement by the individual being nominated (1 page).
  • A collection of up to 10 of the most relevant and impactful student comments from official university student evaluation systems.
  • Unabridged student comments from official university student evaluation systems. The OR Division Awards Director(s) will then review these comments and remove any that do not talk directly about the quality of the course and/or contain superfluous passages.

The nomination package should not include teaching evaluation scores as the OR Division recognizes the biases that exist in these evaluations (see, for example, Article 1, Article 2). Packages that include teaching evaluation scores or refer to teaching evaluation scores may be returned without review. The nominee needs to resubmit the package if the numeric scores appear.

Nomination Submission

Please email the entire nomination package as a single PDF document to the OR Division Awards Director, Talayeh Razzaghi (talayeh.razzaghi@ou.edu), by February 18, 2023. For more information on the IISE Annual Conference click here.

If you ever had a great OR instructor in college, this is your chance to recognize this individual!

Important dates

Nomination deadline: February 18, 2023
Winner notification: March 25, 2023

2022 Winner

Shokoufeh Mirzael
California State Polytechnic University

2020 Winner

Ramteen Sioshansi
The Ohio State University

Past winners

Operations Research Division page

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