Faculty Profile
Ph.D., Operations Research, Cornell University
Michael Ball is the Orkand Corporation Professor of Management Science in the
Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He also holds
a joint appointment within the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) in the Clark
School of Engineering. Dr. Ball received a BES in Engineering Science in 1972
and an MSE in Operations Research in 1972 from Johns Hopkins University and a
PhD in Operations Research in 1977 from Cornell University. He worked for two
years at Bell Laboratories and has had sabbatical appointments at the University
of Waterloo and the University of North Carolina. He is former chair of the
Decision Operations and Information Technologies Faculty Area within the Robert H. Smith
School of Business and former chair of the Executive Committee of the Institute
for Systems Research. He is currently Director of Research for the Smith School.
Dr. Ball's research interests are in network optimization and integer
programming particularly as applied to problems in transportation systems and
supply chain management.. He is Co-Director of NEXTOR, the National Center of
Excellence for Aviation Operations Research. Within NEXTOR, which is funded by
the FAA, NASA and members of the airline industry, he directs the Collaborative
Decision Making research project. The interdisciplinary nature of his work led
to Dr. Ball receiving the Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty Award from the
ISR in 1997. He has over 100 publications in the aforementioned areas and has
made over 100 presentations on these topics. He also has extensive consulting
experience, which, in certain cases, has led to the development and successful
implementation of major software systems.
Dr. Ball is area editor for transportation for Operations Research and is, or
has been, associate editor for Networks, IEEE Transactions on Reliability,
Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, Transportation Science and
IIE
Transactions. He is a member and fellow of INFORMS.
