Jason Koski/University Photography

Professor Jack Muckstadt enjoys remarks made during his retirement celebration, Oct. 26.

About 200 alumni, faculty, students and friends of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) celebrated John A. "Jack" Muckstadt's retirement Oct. 25 with a reception, poster session and symposium in Clark Hall and a dinner on Oct. 26.

Muckstadt, the Acheson-Laibe Professor of Engineering in ORIE and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, joined the faculty in 1974. Along with his research and teaching responsibilities, he was the school director for nine years; he also established and was the first director of the Cornell Manufacturing Engineering and Productivity Program.

A retired U.S. Air Force officer, Muckstadt was co-director of Cornell's Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness up until his retirement. In addition to his teaching and research, Muckstadt has consulted with dozens of corporations about their supply chain management and other operations.

"His shoes are too big to fill," said ORIE Professor Adrian Lewis during morning remarks. "I can see his fingerprints on everything we have accomplished here."

Muckstadt helped build ORIE's reputation by hiring the best and the brightest faculty talent for the school, Lewis said. He also helped put the school on sound financial footing. "He is very canny, very farsighted," Lewis said.

For more than three decades, Muckstadt has championed experiential learning, acting as adviser on countless student projects. "Jack has that rare talent of making ideas work," Lewis said.

Muckstadt has also been a mentor and role model for new faculty, said ORIE and computer science professor David Shmoys. "I was hired by Jack," Shmoys said. "He set the bar, the expectations of what a good faculty member should do."

Shmoys is co-chair of the Academic Planning Committee for the Cornell NYC Tech campus. "Of course I turned to Jack for advice. He was a sage every step of the way," he said.

At the poster session, where 14 Ph.D. students discussed their projects, subjects included algorithms that can determine optimal ambulance travel time, find prime pricing points and detect covert members of terrorist networks. While students made their cases, Muckstadt kept them supplied with hot coffee.

The symposium featured many ORIE alumni as presenters. "This had to be the easiest symposium in the world to organize," said ORIE Professor Peter Jackson. "Everyone we contacted was eager to come back to Cornell to attend this event for Jack."

Presenters included Howard Singer, M.S. '77, Ph.D. '79, senior vice president and chief strategic technologist at Warner Music Group; Retsef Levi, M.S. '04, Ph.D. '05, associate professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Andrew Loerch, M.S. '89, Ph.D. '90, professor in systems engineering and operations research at George Mason University; Ganesh Janakiraman, M.Eng. '01, Ph.D. '02, associate professor of operations management at University of Texas at Dallas; and former Cornell ORIE Professor Robin Roundy, professor of mathematics at Brigham Young University.

In addition, Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, associate professor of public health and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and senior medical adviser of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control Preparedness Modeling Unit, spoke of his collaborations with Muckstadt, and Jackson gave closing remarks.

Kathryn Quinn Thomas is a freelance writer in Rochester, N.Y.