Hani Mahmassani Honored Twice for Storied Career
Hani Mahmassani has received two esteemed honors that reflect his career-long devotion to engineering and transportation research. Mahmassani has been named a Fellow of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He also recently received a lifetime achievement award from the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IABTR).
IATBR Lifetime Achievement Award
At the IATBR Conference in July, Mahmassani was bestowed a lifetime achievement award to honor his storied career at the forefront of transport engineering and his deep knowledge of network design, demand modeling, and traffic flow.
Mahmassani began his educational journey at the American University of Beirut, but his undergraduate education was disrupted due to the Lebanese Civil War. This led Mahmassani to finish his degree at the University of Houston. From then on, Mahmassani studied at Purdue University, and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Throughout his journey, Mahmassani learned from a variety of experts and remained open to studying a wide variety of topics. He encourages students to seek a diverse curriculum encompassing the "fundamentals of transport engineering, covering econometrics, operations research, and the science of transport engineering." Mahmassani’s historic career is detailed in this interview for IATBR News Vol. 4 conducted by Taha Rashidi.
Mahmassani has long been a member of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research. IATBR is an international organization of scholars, researchers, practitioners, consultants, and public agency professionals dedicated to the advancement of travel behavior research.
“I have been involved with IATBR since about 1987 when I attended the 5th International Conference on Travel Behavior Research in Aix-en-Provence,” he said. “I organized the 8th International Conference in 1997 in Austin, TX.”
This award also holds significant meaning for Mahmassani.
“The IATBR Lifetime Achievement Award was particularly special to me because the first recipient of the Award in 2003 was our own Prof. Frank Koppelman, and I was chair of the inaugural committee that awarded it,” he said. “IATBR in many ways has been, and continues to be, like family to me, and being recognized through the lifetime achievement award was a very touching milestone for me.”
INFORMS Fellowship
In addition to his lifetime achievement award from IATBR, Mahmassani has also been named a fellow of INFORMS. His fellowship will be announced during a special induction ceremony on Oct. 20-23 at the annual meeting in Seattle, WA.
Mahmassani joined the predecessor of INFORMS called ORSA (Operations Research Society of America) as a doctoral student in 1980.
“I have been a member first of ORSA then INFORMS continuously since,” he said. “INFORMS has a Transportation and Logistics Society that I am a member of, and which recognized me with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.”
With almost 12,000 members from around the globe, INFORMS is the leading international association for professionals in operations research, analytics, management science, economics, behavioral science, statistics, artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics, and other relevant fields.
INFORMS strives to advance and promote the science and technology of decision-making to save lives, save money, and solve problems through highly-cited publications, conferences, competitions, networking communities, and professional development services.