William A. Massey Wins the 2006 Blackwell/Tapia Prize

William A. Massey Wins the 2006 Blackwell/Tapia Prize

William A. Massey

The Blackwell-Tapia Prize Committee has announced that the 2006 prize will be awarded to William A. Massey, the Edwin S. Wiley Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. The prize is named for David H. Blackwell and Richard A. Tapia, two distinguished mathematical scientists who have been inspirations to more generations of African Americans, Latinos/Latinas, and Native Americans in the mathematical sciences. It is awarded every two years to a mathematical scientist who has made a significant contribution to research in his or her field but who has also served as a role model and contributed in other ways to addressing the problem of under-representation of certain minority groups in the mathematical sciences.

Massey has done cutting edge research in many areas, with his current interests being dynamical queueing systems; performance, pricing, priority, and provisioning models for communication systems and services; asymptotic analysis of stochastic networks; and stochastic orders on posets. His best-known contribution to addressing the under-representation of minorities in mathematics is his continuing work as primary national organizer for the annual Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS). However, his efforts extend well beyond that venue to chairing and contributing to many other national committees and conferences that address this problem, in addition to his personal mentoring of many successful minority mathematical scientists.

The prize will be presented at the Fourth Blackwell-Tapia Conference, to be held at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in Minneapolis on November 3-4, 2006. See http://www.ima.umn.edu/2006-2007/SW11.3-4.06/ for more information.