Michelle M.H. Şeref

Michelle Şeref is a researcher in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management. Her research focus is in the area of Operations Management with special interests in operations/marketing interface and new product development. Michelle has taught courses in Developing Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems (DSS) in the department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Florida for several semesters and received a Teaching Award for her exemplary performance. She has also presented several tutorials at workshops and conferences on the need and importance of teaching DSS material to industrial engineers and business majors. She has also taught at two instructor-training workshops on DSS development. Michelle plans to graduate with her Ph.D. in 2008 and pursue an academic career.

Ravindra K. Ahuja

Ravindra Ahuja is a professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He specializes in mathematical modeling, state-of-the-art network optimization techniques, and solving large-scale scheduling problems arising in logistics and transportation. He founded the company Innovative Scheduling, Inc. to bring cutting-edge operations research and information technology techniques to the field of transportation and scheduling. He has developed innovative models and algorithms for several scheduling problems that were previously considered intractable; these models are now being packaged into interactive web-enabled decision support systems. He is winner of the 1993 Lanchester Prize for the best contribution of the year in Operations Research, the 2003 Pierskalla Award for the best paper on Operations Research in Health Applications, and the 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Award for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. He is a coauthor of the widely used text and reference book “Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications.” He is also a coauthor of the companion book, “Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems,” which describes how to build database-driven decision support systems using Access, VB.NET and ASP.NET.

Wayne L. Winston

Wayne Winston is a professor at the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the Department of Operation & Decision Technologies. He has a Masters degree from MIT in mathematics and a Ph.D. from Yale University in operations research. Professor Winston has written several widely used textbooks on spreadsheet modeling and operations research, including Introduction to Mathematical Programming, Introduction to Probability Models, and Practical Management Science. His primary research areas are spreadsheet models, applied probability, dynamic programming, quality control, and math and sports. He teaches various spreadsheet modeling courses in the MBA program at Indiana University and has been the recipient of the Lilly Award for Teaching Excellence four times. Professor Winston is also involved in several consulting projects with companies including Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, the Dallas Mavericks, and the Department of Defense and US Army. He is also a two-time Jeopardy! champion.