UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel receives the 2025 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The award was presented on October 26 at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, by Katya Scheinberg (left), Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and Andrea Lodi (right), the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University.
The University of Washington Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering congratulates Professor Maryam Fazel, recipient of the 2025 Farkas Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, or INFORMS, Optimization Society. She accepted the award in late October during the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
The Farkas Prize is an annual award honoring a mid-career researcher for outstanding, career-spanning contributions to the field of optimization — a discipline that develops mathematical models and algorithms to improve decision making, advance engineering design, and provide the computational foundation for machine learning systems.
Fazel was recognized for her foundational work in optimization and her pioneering contributions to data science and artificial intelligence. The award was presented on Sunday, October 26, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
“I’m deeply honored to receive the Farkas Prize. Optimization has been a central theme in my research, and it’s exciting to see its growing impact on fields like data science and artificial intelligence,” Fazel said. “This recognition reflects the incredible collaborations I’ve had with students, postdoctoral scholars, and colleagues over the years, and I look forward to continuing to explore new challenges in this area.”
Fazel holds the Moorthy Family Inspiration Career Development Professorship and serves as director of the Institute for Foundations of Data Science at the UW. INFORMS promotes the development and application of data optimization methods and software tools to solve complex problems in operations research and management science.
Learn more about the Farkas Prize on the INFORMS website.