Warren B Powell

Warren B Powell is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years, and is Co-founder and the Chief Innovation Officer at Optimal Dynamics. He was the founder and director of CASTLE Lab, which focused on stochastic optimization with applications to freight transportation, energy systems, health, ecommerce, finance and the laboratory sciences, supported by over $50 million in funding from government and industry. He has pioneered a new universal framework for sequential decision problems, including the identification of four classes of policies that span every possible method for making decisions. This framework lays the foundation for his latest book: Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization: A unified framework for sequential decisions published by Wiley. He has published over 250 papers, four books, and produced over 60 graduate students and post-docs. He is the 2021 recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Informs Society for Transportation Science and Logistics, and the 2022 Saul Gass Expository Writing Award. He is a fellow of Informs, and the recipient of numerous other awards.