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Robert E. Bixby is a noted authority on the theory and practice of optimization. He is Research Professor of Management in Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and Research Professor and Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University's Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Bixby has held academic positions at Cornell University, University of Kentucky, and Northwestern University. He has held visiting faculty positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison; Institut fur Operations Research in Bonn, Germany; Institut fur Mathematik der Universitat Augsburg, Germany; and, he received a Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award which supported his work at the Konrad-Zuse Zentrum fur Informations Technik and the Technische Universitat in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Bixby is Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Matheon DFG Research Center, Mathematics for Key Technologies (www.matheon.de). He is formerly Vice President and President of the Mathematical Programming Society and co-founder of CPLEX Optimization. CPLEX Optimization was sold to ILOG, Inc. in 1997. Dr. Bixby was an ILOG board member from 1997 to 2000, President of the ILOG Technical Advisory Board, and ILOG's Chief Scientific Officer. In 1997, Dr. Bixby was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a charter member of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). Robert Bixby earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of California-Berkeley and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University.