September 14, 2023 Del Pia wins optimization prize Written By: Tom Ziemer Departments: Industrial & Systems Engineering Categories: Awards|Faculty Alberto Del Pia, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received the 2023 Egon Balas Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences’ (INFORMS) Optimization Society. The award, which will be presented during the 2023 INFORMS annual meeting in Phoenix in October, goes to a researcher “for a body of contributions in the area of optimization.” Del Pia will also deliver a lecture at the meeting as an honoree. Del Pia, who holds a dual appointment in ISyE and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on campus, studies mathematical optimization, discrete mathematics and the mathematics of data science. The Balas Prize citation lauds him for making “fundamental contributions to a wide range of problems in discrete mathematical optimization.” Del Pia previously earned the society’s Prize for Young Researchers in 2017. He has authored more than 50 published or accepted journal and conference papers.