News: ORIE

Fish consumption during pregnancy is a complex scientific topic. On one hand, fish are rich in nutrients essential to brain development, including polyunsaturated fatty acids, selenium, iodine, and vitamin D. On the other, fish contain methyl mercury, a known neurotoxicant. This has led the US Food and Drug Administration to recommend that expectant mothers limit consumption, which inadvertently causes many women to forgo fish consumption during pregnancy altogether. Because fish consumption is an important route of methyl mercury exposure, efforts to understand the health risk posed by... Read more

A gift establishing the Professor William Maxwell '56 Fellows will financially support research professors and students affiliated with Cornell's Engineering Innovations in Medicine initiative. Read more

Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan (CFEM) student Tashae Bowes recently received the Prime Minister’s National Youth Award for Excellence from Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness. Bowes is one of 21 Jamaicans under the age of 30 to be chosen for the honor this year. Bowes was awarded in the category of “Academics” and was nervous at the ceremony. “All of the nominees who made it to the short list were invited,” Bowes said. “But we did not know who the awardees would be until that moment when they announced our names.” The awards ceremony took place on April 20, 2024 on the lawns at... Read more

At a luncheon on May 21, 42 Merrill Scholars celebrated the mentors who had the greatest influence on their early education and the Cornell faculty or staff members who contributed most significantly to their college experience. Read more

Cornell faculty members Ailong Ke, David Shmoys and Martin T. Wells have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Read more

ORIE third-year student Kiran Chandrasekher ’25 has won a 2024 Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater Scholarship is one of the most competitive scholarships offered to undergraduates in the US pursuing careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. For a student to be considered for the Goldwater Scholarship, which honors former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, their name must be put forth by their undergraduate institution. This year, 446 academic institutions nominated 1,353 science, engineering, and math students. Of this group of nominees, 438 were chosen as 2024 Goldwater... Read more

David Williamson has been appointed as the next Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE). In addition to his role as a professor in ORIE, Williamson is also a professor and recently served as chair in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. He will begin his three-year term on January 1, 2025, upon return from sabbatical leave. Adrian Lewis, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering and a previous ORIE Director, has agreed to lead the school in an interim capacity for a six... Read more

Lopez de Prado's article, "Where are the Factors in Factor Investing?" was published in The Journal of Portfolio Management and identifies a significant logical inconsistency within the factor investing literature. It was recognized for its critical examination of the econometric approaches used in factor investing studies. He argues that while factor models are intended to have a causal interpretation, researchers virtually never justify their model specification choices in causal terms, hence the question “where are the factors in factor investing?” This oversight leads to misspecified... Read more

For the first time in Cornell Engineering’s history, every school and department currently has, or will soon have, a woman faculty member on the college’s executive leadership team. The milestone comes as the college celebrates the 140th anniversary of its first woman engineer. Read more

Researchers studying large-scale artificial intelligence, microbial biomanufacturing and causal inference methods are among the Cornell researchers who recently received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards. Read more