Who's Who at Technion: Prof. Aharon Ben-Tal

Find out more about Technion's new Dean at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management..

Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management Prof. Aharon Ben-Tal.

Prof. Ben-Tal's first degree, at Tel-Aviv University, was a double major in Statistics and Economics. His second degree, also at Tel-Aviv University was in Statistics, specializing in Operations Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, U.S.A. After two years of postdoctoral work at McGill University (Montreal) and University of Texas (Austin), he joined the Technion's Computer Science Faculty in 1975, moving in 1981 to the Industrial Engineering and Management Faculty, where he served as Dean from 1989-92. Prof. Ben-Tal has held visiting positions at the University of Copenhagen, University of Michigan,  Delft University of Technology.Princeton, MIT and other North American universities.

Aharon Ben-Tal is a Professor of Operations Research and Head of the MINERVA Optimization Center at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and holder of the Dresner Chair.  He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1973.He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, University of Copenhagen, Delft University of Technology, MIT and CWI Amsterdam.

His interests are in Continuous Optimization, particularly nonsmooth and large-scale problems,  conic and robust optimization, as well as convex and non smooth analysis. Recently the focus of his research is on optimization problems affected by uncertainty. In the last 15 years, he has devoted much effort to engineering applications of optimization methodology and computational schemes. Some of the algorithms developed in the MINERVA Optimization Center are in use by Industry ( Medical Imaging, Aerospace).

He has published more than 120 papers in professional journals and co-authored three books:  Optimality in Nonlinear Programming:  A Feasible Direction Approach (Wiley-Interscience, 1981) Lectures on Modern Convex Optimization:  Analysis, Algorithms and Engineering Applications (SIAM-MPS series on optimization, 2001)  and Robust Optimization  (Princeton University press,2009). Prof. Ben-Tal was Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion (1989-1992). He served as a council member of the Mathematical Programming Society (1994-1997).  He was Area Editor (Continuous Optimization) of Math. of  Operations Research (1993-1999), member of the Editorial Board of SIAM J. Optimization, J. Convex Analysis, OR Letters, Mathematical Programming, Management Science, Math. Modeling and Numerical Analysis, European J. of Operations Research and Computational Management Science.  Beginning January 2012 he will be Area Editor (Optimization) for Operations Research.

In 2011, Prof. Tal received the IBM Faculty Award.