School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
The Program
At Georgia Tech the discipline of Operations Research (OR) has always resided within the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). While playing an important role throughout the School's long history, it has really been during the last 20 years that OR at Georgia Tech has achieved the substantial research and educational presence it now enjoys across the field. Today, approximately 45 full-time academic faculty members in ISyE teach and conduct research in virtually every topic and sub-discipline identified with modern Operations Research. To our knowledge, this is by far the largest concentration of OR faculty housed in any single academic unit in the country, possibly in the world. Beyond sheer size, however, it is also the case that the OR Faculty here currently counts among its members some of the field's most important figures in their respective concentrations. This has led to a climate where now, various OR concentrations in the School are among the very best in the world.
Masters degrees offered include the Master of Science in Operations Research (MSOR), the Master of Science in Statistics (MSStat) for students concentrating explicitly in statistics, and the Master of Science in Quantitative and Computational Finance (MSQCF) which is attractive to students interested in financial engineering. Qualified students admitted to the doctoral program can pursue the Ph.D. in OR built around programs of study in the major methodological concentrations of optimization and stochastics as well as in naturally related applications areas such as logistics and economic decision analysis. The School also offers the Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO). The ACO Program is a very competitive doctoral program co-sponsored with the School of Mathematics and the College of Computing and appeals to students primarily interested in fundamental work pertaining to discrete structures, i.e., graph theory, integer and combinatorial optimization, polyhedra, complexity, analysis of algorithms, approximation, and the like.
