Cynthia Barnhart
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
 

Professor Cynthia Barnhart is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the MIT School of Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems. She is Co-director of MIT’s Operations Research Center and the 2008 president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Professor Barnhart’s teaching and research interests involve the development of optimization methods for large-scale transportation and logistics problems. Her approaches often require the development of new models and algorithms, and their implementations in real operating environments. Her research foci include: integrated schedule planning, robust scheduling and real-time re-planning.

At MIT, Professor Barnhart has developed and taught courses entitled, “Carrier Systems”, “Optimization of Large-Scale Transportation Systems”, “Transportation Systems Analysis”, “Airline Schedule Planning”, and “The Airline Industry.” Each course describes models and methods for designing, planning, analyzing and operating transportation and logistics systems.

At MIT, Professor Barnhart has served as Co-Director of both the Center for Transportation and Logistics and the Operations Research Center. She has served in editorial positions for Operations Research, Transportation Science, and Management Science, as President of the INFORMS Women in Operations Research/ Management Science Forum, as President of the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society, and as the liaison between the INFORMS Transportation Science Section and the INFORMS Aviation Applications Special Interest Group. Professor Barnhart has been awarded the Franz Edelman 2nd Prize for Achievement in Operations and the Management Sciences, the INFORMS Award for the Best Paper in Transportation and Logistics, the WORMS award for the Advancement of Women in Operations Research and Management Science, the Mitsui Faculty Development Chair, the Junior Faculty Career Award from the General Electric Foundation and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

Professor Barnhart’s work has been published in several books and in research journals such as Transportation Science, Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and Annals of Operations Research.

Professor Barnhart earned a B.S. degree from the University of Vermont in 1981 and both S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and 1988, respectively.