Stanford Report, November 29, 2006
Honors & Awards
YINYU YE, professor of management science and engineering, is the first recipient of the Farkas Prize, which recognizes the most significant contribution by a researcher to the field of optimization. Ye's contribution was developing computational modeling for solving problems, such as scheduling optimal holding time for landing aircraft. He received the award Nov. 5 in Pittsburgh at the annual national meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award is named after Gyula Farkas, the field's forerunner and author of one of the field's most frequently cited theorems.
SONJA SCHMID, a social science research associate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, has been awarded the 2006 Brooke Hindle Fellowship by the Society for the History of Technology. Schmid will use the accompanying $10,000 prize to support additional research in Russia for a book she is writing on the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet and Russian nuclear power industry. Much of the history of the industry was never written down. Schmid has conducted extensive research in Russian archives that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She also has interviewed more than 20 senior nuclear specialists in Russia. She still wants to get access to the archive of the Russian Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy, which maintains records on its military and civilian programs. While the agency has published a series of documents on the history of the Soviet atomic bomb—the military program—the civilian program remains classified. Schmid’s research on the Soviet industry stands to illuminate technological decisions that had profound consequences. “While everything about the Chernobyl accident was Soviet—the reactor design, the attitude of observers, the bureaucracy—it shook a system that was designed to be safe,” she said. “The system, by its own standards and norms, was normal and perfectly functional. Chernobyl is not something that ‘could happen only in the Soviet Union.’ It could happen elsewhere.”