The 2005 INFORMS Expository Writing Award was presented to Lawrence M. Wein for his papers on queueing, medical therapy and public health policy. The award honors an operations researcher whose publications, over a period of at least 10 years, demonstrate a consistently high standard of expository writing.

Committee Chair Andrzej Ruszczynski made the presentation at the INFORMS annual meeting in San Francisco.

According to the award citation, Wein made his name in heavy-traffic analysis of queueing models, a technical area, which is often more excessively formal than readily approachable. Wein, however, developed an expositional style that made his work accessible to a broader audience and created a model that many researchers have since followed. His paper with D.M. Markowitz, "Heavy Traffic Analysis of Dynamic Cyclic Policies: A Unified Treatment of the Single Machine Scheduling Problem" (Operations Research, 2001, Vol. 49, pgs. 246-270), is a perfect example of this approach.

Wein's more recent work on medical treatment and public health has exhibited a similar high level of expositional clarity and perhaps been more influential, reaching beyond just an operations research audience. An excellent example is "Sequencing Surgery, Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy: Insights From a Mathematical Analysis," (Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, 2002, Vol. 74, pgs. 279-286, joint with D. R. Beil), which considers the choice of treatment protocols from the control-theoretic point of view. The authors provide insights for bio-medical professionals without overwhelming readers with technicalities. His work on public health has had an even greater impact. His paper on smallpox vaccination in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2002, Vol. 99, pgs. 10,935-10,940, with E. H. Kaplan and David L. Craft) uses operations research techniques to develop a disease transmission model and to evaluate response policies. This paper and his other publications on public health consistently rank at the top of the most read publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In accepting the award, Wein thanked his Ph.D. advisor and former Expository Award winner Mike Harrison for "instilling in me the importance of expository writing, and the way he did that was by writing 'Ugh!' many times on the first draft of my thesis." Wein also thanked Ed Kaplan who he says "opened up my eyes to the possibilities of writing for a wider audience."






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