Mark E. Lewis | |
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| Born | 1970 (age 54–55) |
| Education | Eckerd College (BS & BA, 1992) Florida State University (MS, 1995) Georgia Tech (PhD, 1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Industrial engineering |
| Institutions | Cornell University (since 2005) University of Michigan (1999-2005) |
| Thesis | Bias Optimality in a Two-Class Nonstationary Queueing System (1998) |
Mark Edwin Lewis (born 1970) is an American industrial engineer and professor at Cornell University. He was the first African-American faculty member hired in Industrial Engineering at University of Michigan and the first tenured African-American faculty member at the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. [1] Lewis' research is focused on stochastic processes, and queueing theory and Markov decision processes in particular. [2]
Lewis received a BS degree in mathematics and a BA degree in political science at Eckerd College, graduating in 1992. [3] He proceeded to earn an MS degree in theoretical statistics from Florida State University in 1995 and a PhD degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech in 1998. [2] Lewis' PhD thesis Bias Optimality in a Two-Class Nonstationary Queueing System [4] at Georgia Tech was advised by Robert E. Foley. [5]
After his PhD, Lewis spent a year at the University of British Columbia as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1999, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as Assistant Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering. [3] [6] Lewis became Associate Professor at the Operations Research and Information Engineering department at Cornell University in 2005 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2011. [2]
Lewis founded the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Minority Issues Forum in 2001 and served as its first president. [7] In 2009, Lewis co-chaired the 15th INFORMS Applied Probability Conference at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. [8] [9] Lewis acted as chair of the Applied Probability Society from 2012 to 2014. [10] [11] In 2024, Lewis was elected to be the 2025 INFORMS President-elect and subsequently the 2026 President of INFORMS. [12] [13]
Lewis was Associate Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development for Cornell University's College of Engineering from 2015 to 2020. [14] [15] In this role, he acted as task force chair of the Faculty Diversity Committee, which was convened in 2017. [16] Lewis served as principal investigator on the Cornell University Engineering Success Program to increase the participation of underrepresented minority and first-generation college students. [17] [18]
Lewis researches the optimal control of non-stationary systems, developing policies for admission and pricing at non-stationary queueing systems with finite capacity and multiple customer classes, with applications in production, communication, and the airline industry. [19]
He studied the dynamic control and optimal resource allocation of service systems, such as call centers, through "upgrades, reneging, and retrials" (for example after market segmentation). [20]
Lewis also develops methods for optimization of Markov decision processes to study problems such as inventory control and revenue management. [21]
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