After much deliberation, I have decided to withdraw my candidacy for INFORMS President-Elect. I am deeply grateful to the Nominating Committee for its confidence in me, and to the many colleagues who have encouraged me over the years to serve INFORMS in this role. This is not a decision I have made lightly.
My reason is straightforward: I believe the practice voice is more important than which practitioner carries it.
Some context matters here. The Nominating Committee's slate for this election included two practitioners, reflecting a deliberate judgment about the perspective INFORMS most needs in its senior leadership at this moment. The petition process subsequently added a third candidate to the ballot. That process is a legitimate part of how INFORMS elections work, and I respect it. The result, however, is a field in which practitioner support could divide in ways that approval voting is designed to prevent, but often does not.
INFORMS members may support more than one candidate through approval voting. However, in conversations with members and long-tenured community leaders, I have found that many are unaware the option exists, or have simply not used it, even though it has appeared on our ballots for years. With two practitioners on the ballot, I see a real risk of dividing support for a perspective I consider essential to INFORMS' future. I am not willing to take that risk simply to preserve my own candidacy.
Why does the practice perspective matter so much?
Operations research is, at its core, an applied science. Our methods matter because they help people and organizations make better decisions. But practice is not simply the last step in a linear process where research produces a model and someone else implements it. Real problems rarely respect the boundaries of our formulations. Assumptions collide with incentives, organizational constraints, human behavior, competing objectives, and legacy systems, with consequences that unfold over months and years. Implementation reveals things we did not know to ask when the problem was first framed.
Practitioners who lead OR, analytics, and decision-science capabilities from within organizations experience that entire cycle. Beyond developing good answers, they must earn trust, influence decisions, navigate competing stakeholders, implement solutions, live with the consequences, and keep improving as reality exposes what was missed. That experience creates a different kind of judgment, and a different systems-level view of the problems our profession exists to solve. It is not a substitute for academic expertise; it is an essential complement to it.
This is why I have said throughout my career that practice sharpens research. The exchange runs in both directions. Hard, consequential problems expose assumptions and generate research questions that are difficult to see from outside the system, and rigorous scholarship in turn gives practitioners better ways to understand and solve them. When that exchange works, both communities grow stronger.
And in the end, we all want to make a difference. For academic researchers, deeper engagement with practice can make already rigorous work more consequential. For practitioners, deeper engagement with research expands what is possible. For students, seeing both creates a richer understanding of the profession they are entering. INFORMS is uniquely positioned to bring these communities together, but doing so requires the experience of practice to be represented meaningfully in its senior leadership.
That need is increasingly urgent. AI, analytics, and data science are rapidly reshaping the landscape around us. INFORMS' distinctive strength is not simply a collection of methods. It is our ability to bring rigor, systems thinking, and disciplined decision-making to consequential problems. Maintaining that relevance requires leadership that understands both how knowledge advances and what it takes to turn that knowledge into sustained impact.
Members will have other candidates to consider, and each of you will weigh the choice as you see fit. My purpose here is to explain my decision and be clear about my own vote.
I am confidently supporting Stefan Karisch.
I've known Stefan for years through the INFORMS Roundtable, most recently at its retreat in Colorado last month. His career has spanned academia and decades of internal leadership in organizations where analytical work had to produce real results. He has led across complex systems and diverse stakeholders, and has had to own implementation and outcomes rather than simply recommend them. He brings intellectual depth, broad organizational experience, and thoughtful, even-keeled judgment that I have consistently respected, even when we have disagreed. Most importantly for this moment, he understands that strengthening practice does not weaken the academic core of INFORMS; it strengthens it.
The Nominating Committee undertook a thoughtful process that weighed not only the qualifications of individual candidates but the strategic needs of INFORMS and the composition of its leadership. I respect that process, and I believe the perspective it brought forward matters. My decision is not to step away from the case I made as a candidate. It is to put that case ahead of my candidacy.
I am withdrawing my candidacy and asking you to vote for Stefan Karisch for INFORMS President-Elect.
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Jonathan Owen
Head of Advanced Analytics Center, Chief Scientist for Operations Research and Advanced Analytics
General Motors (retired)
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