Prof. Terlaky is Chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and George N. and Soteria Kledaras ’87 Endowed Chair Professor at Lehigh U.Prior to his appointment at Lehigh U., where he served as the Chair of ISE 2008-2017, Prof. Terlaky has taught at Eötvös U., Budapest, Hungary; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands; McMaster U., ON, Canada. At McMaster he also served as the founding Director of the School of Computational Engineering and Science.
Prof. Terlaky has published four books, edited over ten books and journal special issues and published over 180 research papers. Topics include theoretical and algorithmic foundations of mathematical optimization (e.g., invention of the criss-cross method, oriented matroid programming), design and analysis of large classes of interior point methods, computational optimization, worst case examples of the central path, nuclear reactor core reloading optimization, oil refinery and VLSI design and robust radiation therapy treatment optimization, and inmate assignment optimization.
Prof. Terlaky is Founding Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Optimization and Engineering. He has served as associate editor of ten journals and has served as conference chair, conference organizer, and distinguished invited speaker at conferences all over the world. He was general Chair of the INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting, a former Chair of INFORMS' Optimization Society, Chair of the ICCOPT Steering Committee of the Mathematical Optimization Society, currently Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization, he is Fellow of the Fields Institute, and Fellow of INFORMS. He received the MITACS Mentorship Award for his distinguished graduate student supervisory record, and the Award of Merit of the Canadian Operations Research Society. November 2017 he received the Wagner Prize of INFORMS and the Egerváry Award of the Hungarian Operations Research Society.
His research interest includes high performance optimization algorithms, optimization modeling and its applications.