2023 Harold W. Kuhn Award
Since 2005, each year, Naval Research Logistics has given a publication award, the Harold W. Kuhn Award, to the paper(s) selected as the very best from among all those published over the past three years in the journal. The inaugural 2005 Kuhn Award was given to: "The Hungarian Method for the Assignment Problem" by Harold W. Kuhn.
Among more than 180 papers published in NRL during the previous three years, from 2020 to 2022 inclusive, the award committee, with input from the journal editorial board, selected the paper "Where to locate COVID-19 mass vaccination facilities?" by Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li, and Alessandro Previero (Naval Research Logistics 69(2), 179-200, 2022), as the winner of the 2023 Harold W. Kuhn Award.
In the citation, the committee noted that "The paper is commendable for its integration of an epidemiological model with an optimization model to support the strategic location of COVID-19 mass vaccination sites. The paper provides a scalable algorithm for efficiently computing solutions. It demonstrates, through numerical experiments that are carefully calibrated with real-world data, that optimized site locations can reduce mortality by 20%, saving 4,000 additional lives over three months and ensuring equitable distribution across states."
Please join us in congratulating this year's winners!
Harold W. Kuhn Award Committee
Saif Benjaafar (chair), Bin Hu, and Negin (Nicki) Golrezaei
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Saif Benjaafar
Goff Smith Co-Director of the Joel D.Tauber Institute for Global Operations
Seth Bonder Collegiate Professor
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
https://ioe.engin.umich.edu/people/benjaafar-saif/
https://benjaafar.com/
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