Blackwell Prize: Past Winners

Peter W. Glynn, the Thomas W. Ford Professor in Engineering at Stanford University, is a co-winner of the 2025 Blackwell Prize. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society (APS) recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions in the field of applied probability.

Peter Glynn’s work lies at the foundation of stochastic simulation, which he helped elevate from a loose amalgam of computational ideas when first he began working in the area to a rigorous discipline built on the foundation of probability theory. He is especially known, in this subject, for his work on regenerative simulation, the development of likelihood-ratio gradient estimation, importance sampling and rare-event simulation and multi-level Monte Carlo. He is also deeply respected for his work on computational probability, queueing theory, statistical inference for stochastic processes, and stochastic modeling. He has worked on problems arising in machine learning, exposing glaring problems with the application of widespread notions like regret minimization in dynamic learning. His research has consistently demonstrated the exquisite interplay between theoretical depth and practical applicability that characterizes top-shelf work in applied probability. His work has profoundly influenced, and continues to influence, wide-ranging developments in the field. In these and other endeavors, he has advised over 50 PhD students, many of whom have also become academic and research leaders in the field.

Glynn’s professional service contributions are equally impressive. For example, he was the Chair of INFORMS/APS from 2004-2006, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Stochastic Systems, the flagship journal of INFORMS/APS. He has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Probability and Advances in Applied Probability (2016-2018), and as co-editor of the Journal of Computational Finance (1997-2001). 

J. Michael Harrison, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, is a co-winner of the 2025 Blackwell Prize. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society (APS) recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions in the field of applied probability.

Mike Harrison has made seminal contributions to mathematical finance. His breakthrough papers (co-authored with Kreps in 1979 and with Pliska in 1981) revolutionized mathematical finance in developing the mathematical foundations of option theory, and (quoting from one nomination letter) “showing that the 1973 Black-Scholes-Merton Nobel Prize-winning approach to modeling option prices was at the leading edge of a far bigger family of tractable problems." Harrison has also been a leader in developing and advancing the use of Brownian models for the analysis and control of a broad class of networks that he calls “stochastic processing networks”. Especially, in characterizing the limiting regimes of queues and queueing networks and facilitating their computation and approximation, he and his co-authors have developed pioneering concepts and fundamental tools such as reflected Brownian motion (RBM) in an orthant, basic adjoint relationship (BAR), and state-space collapse. 

Throughout his long career, Harrison has advised or mentored a remarkable group of scholars who have become academic leaders in their own right. The list is “perhaps unparalleled in the breadth and depth of his mentoring activities”, quoting from another nomination letter, including multiple members of NAE (National Academy of Engineering) and NAS (National Academy of Science), numerous winners of top INFORMS awards (such as von Neumann Prize and Lanchester Prize), and several deans of leading business schools (Cambridge, Chicago and Columbia), and provost (Johns Hopkins) and president (Tufts). 

Frank P. Kelly, Emeritus Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the University of Cambridge, is a co-winner of the 2025 Blackwell Prize. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society (APS) recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions in the field of applied probability.

Frank Kelly has made foundational contributions to the theory of queueing and stochastic networks. He developed the notion of quasi-reversibility as a fundamental property that characterizes so-called product-form networks, a broad class of queueing networks that exhibit attractive structural properties, facilitating exact analyses and computations. Kelly has also been instrumental in extending Erlang’s classical loss-network model to the principled design and analysis of contemporary telecommunication systems and protocols. He pioneered the concept and the underlying theory of proportional fairness and network utility maximization, both of which have become instrumental in designing optimal resource allocation schemes and protocols in the Internet (e.g., TCP/IP) and data center networks.

Kelly’s scientific contributions have won wide recognition across the UK, EU and the US by multiple professional societies in communications/computing (IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, IEEE Kobayashi Award, SIGMETRICS Achievement Award), in mathematics and statistics (Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society, Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society, David Crighton Medal of IMA and LMS), as well as in operations research (Beale Medal of the Operational Research Society, EURO Gold Medal, INFORMS von Neumann Prize and Lanchester Prize).

Francois Baccelli, senior researcher at INRIA/Paris and head of the European Research Council NEMO project on network mobility, is the 2024 Blackwell Prize winner. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions within the area of applied probability.

Francois Baccelli has been a prominent figure in the fields of applied probability and communications for several decades, making significant contributions through his extensive research and scholarly work. As the author of five influential books and over 200 research papers, Baccelli has profoundly advanced not only the theory of applied probability, stochastic geometry and dynamic systems, but also their applications to communication systems including wireless networks and Internet traffic. His notable contributions include pioneering work on stochastic spatial networks, elucidating the connections between Palm probabilities and queueing theory, and advancing the theory of stochastic geometry with key applications to wireless networks. Additionally, his development of the max-plus algebraic approach has offered valuable insights into the modeling and analysis of discrete event systems, further cementing his role as a leading innovator in his field.

Francois Baccelli has further made many leadership contributions to the field, in funding and directing a few distinct research groups throughout the years; in training an entire generation of graduate students, many of whom are now established professors and have branched out in multiple directions; and in organizing many research conferences. Quoting from one of the nomination letters, "in his gentle way [Baccelli] brings people together and lets things happen. He has an exceptional ability to see things from different perspectives, find the wider potential in an idea, see the practical relevance of an abstract idea and, conversely, the theoretical potential in a practical problem.

Onno Boxma, emeritus professor of Stochastic Operations Research at Eindhoven University of Technology, is the inaugural Blackwell Prize winner. This award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society recognizes fundamental and sustained career contributions within the area of Applied Probability.

Over the course of his career, Professor Boxma has established himself as a global leader within the Applied Probability community, who has made seminal contributions to queueing theory. In particular, his research on analytic methods in queueing theory, polling systems and conservation laws, heavy-tailed stochastic systems, and the analysis of queues and risk models fed by Levy processes, all comprise deep and influential work that has had profound impact on the field. Specifically, his monograph on boundary value analysis of queueing systems, co-authored with J.W. Cohen, remains a fundamental reference on this powerful approach, and includes a beautiful non-product characterization of the stationary distribution of an important coupled processor model. In the late eighties, he was the first to establish crucial work decomposition properties and pseudo-conservation laws for multi-class queueing systems and so-called polling systems in particular. The ideas developed within this body of work were later generalized to polyhedral characterizations of the achievable performance for multi-class queueing systems, and they continue to find application today in areas as diverse as wireless random-access communication networks and smart transportation systems. Within the domain of heavy-tailed queues, Professor Boxma brought classical Tauberian theorems to bear on this application area, as well as more probabilistic sample path methods, in developing deep insights into the interplay between tail behavior and scheduling. His more recent research has focused on the interface between queueing, risk theory, Markov additive processes, and Levy processes, and has led, for example, to novel identities for a class of two-dimensional reflected Levy processes, which appear new (and promising) even in the special case of reflected Brownian motion.

Onno Boxma has further made many leadership contributions to the field. ln training an entire generation of graduate students, many of whom are now established professors and have branched out in multiple directions, he has played a major role in creating the Dutch Queueing Theory school. He also has been of great service to the international community, as a founder and director of EURANDOM, as Editor-in-Chief of Queueing Systems, and as an organizer of many of the key conferences that have served a critical role within the community.