Two USC Viterbi Professors Named INFORMS Fellows

Ali Abbas and Johannes Royset, professors in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, have been elected INFORMS Fellows, one of the profession's most prestigious distinctions.

INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is the world's largest professional association for experts who use data, mathematics and analysis to improve decisions. Its Fellows are recognized for outstanding lifetime achievements in research, education, professional service, management or the practical use of their work.

"I felt deeply honored," Abbas said. "It was especially meaningful that this recognition came from colleagues working across many areas of the profession."

Royset called the news a pleasant surprise and said the recognition carries added meaning because it comes from a community in which he has long been active.

"Certainly, a great recognition, and I was very thankful to learn about that," Royset said.

Added Maged Dessouky, ISE department chair and Tryon Chair in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Spatial Sciences Institute: "Johannes and Ali are at the forefront of their respective fields. Only 12 members were named INFORMS Fellows this year and to have two in the department speaks to the quality of the faculty."

Ali Abbas

For Abbas, the award recognizes a career devoted to a difficult but universal question: how should people make choices when they care about several competing goals and are uncertain about what will happen?

On a personal level, consider a person choosing a job and who might weigh salary against meaningful work, location, advancement, vacation time and work-life balance. Governments face much higher-stakes trade-offs involving public safety, cost and long-term consequences with uncertainty about the outcome. Abbas develops ways to make those choices more orderly, transparent and consistent with the decision maker's values and information.

He believes that in his selection, INFORMS recognized influential papers which have won numerous awards, widely used textbooks, teaching awards, professional service, and his efforts to explain decision analysis to governments and industry leaders. His work has been applied to homeland and transportation security, engineering systems, and public policy. He also introduced to the field Ethical Decision Quality, an approach that makes ethics part of a decision from the beginning instead of treating it as an afterthought.

Additionally, Abbas has helped carry those ideas into classrooms. He co-authored the widely used textbook "Foundations of Decision Analysis" with Stanford University's Ronald A. Howard, and has taught decision-making to students, executives, government officials and at-risk teens. For Abbas, making the field understandable comes hand-in-hand with extending its theory. He authored the textbook "Foundations of Multiattribute Utility" to bring his research results to a broader audience.

The honor also has personal meaning for Abbas, who traces his academic lineage back to the founders of his field: Philip Morse and George Kimball, the pioneers who helped establish modern operations research and co-wrote the influential book "Methods of Operations Research." His mentor, the late Howard, studied under both Morse and Kimball, and Abbas thinks of them as his "academic grandfathers."

Being elected a Fellow of the professional society carries their intellectual tradition forward, Abbas said, and reminds him of his responsibility to advance it and make it more accessible.

The recognition follows several other major honors this year. Abbas recently received the 2026 Frank P. Ramsey Medal, the highest honor of theINFORMS Decision Analysis Society, and the IEOM Outstanding Professor Award from the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Society. In addition, he received the INFORMS Clemen-Kleinmuntz 2026 Best Publication Award and the Viterbi School of Engineering Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award.

Abbas has also focused on exploring how artificial intelligence can help people identify goals, consider alternatives and weigh consequences without replacing human judgment or responsibility.

"I want to help create a world in which decision skills are understood as essential life skills," Abbas said. "And where an ethical decision lens is an essential part of this skill. This should be a priority for all parents, educators, business leaders, government officials, and decision professionals."

Johannes Royset

Royset's work begins with a simple concern: Before trusting the answer produced by a mathematical model, people should be confident that the model asked the right question and that its answer will remain useful even when conditions change.

That is especially important now, he said, because artificial intelligence has made it easier to produce calculations and recommendations. Royset's central contribution has been strengthening the mathematical foundation beneath models involving uncertainty. In other words, he wants to ensure that the numbers make sense and that a recommendation is not so fragile that it works only under one narrow set of circumstances.

Royset believes that combination of mathematical rigor and practical work helped lead to his selection. He also has served the profession through INFORMS conferences, events and journals. But what motivates him most is using mathematics to solve consequential problems.

Much of his research has involved national security, military operations and emergency preparedness. Those settings may include damaged roads, disrupted supply lines, incomplete information and adversaries actively trying to undermine a plan. A flawed recommendation can carry far greater consequences than an error in an online advertisement, making dependable analysis especially important.

In one line of work, Royset has studied how the Marine Corps could better move food, water, ammunition and other supplies through dangerous or damaged areas. A useful plan must account for blocked roads, attacks and other disruptions while remaining reliable enough to guide real operations.

Royset is leading a five-year, $2.1 million Office of Naval Research project involving USC, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara and the Naval Postgraduate School. The researchers are studying how artificial intelligence performs in complicated situations involving uncertainty, deception and many moving parts. The work could help military officers train against smarter computer opponents and help designers understand how autonomous systems such as robots might be observed, predicted or exploited by attackers. The project focuses on mathematical models and computer simulations.

Looking ahead, Royset wants to improve decision-making for problems so hard that no method can reliably find the single best answer. In those cases, he aims to develop dependable estimates of the worst-case outcome, so decision makers can rule out dangerous options and reduce risk.

"The wonderful thing about industrial and systems engineering and the whole INFORMS community is that we're really trying to work on problems that matter," Royset said.

Published on October 12th, 2026

Last updated on October 12th, 2026