Bruce Shepherd wins 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award

Bruce Shepherd, who completed a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Victoria in 1985, has won the 2016 UVic Distinguished Alumni Award for the Faculty of Science. There will be an award ceremony on Tuesday, February 2nd to honour Shepherd and other distinguished alumni.

Bruce Shepherd is a member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University where he has held the position of James McGill Professor (internal equivalent of a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair) since 2007. He is also an associate member of McGill's School of Computer Science

Dr. Shepherd completed a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Victoria and then studied at the University of Waterloo where he earned his MSc and Ph.D. in Department of Combinatorics and Optimization. During his doctoral studies he also worked with his advisor William Pulleyblank to produce train scheduling software for the meet-pass problem at Canadian Pacific Railway. He went on to hold a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship working with Lex Schrijver in CWI, Amsterdam and a Von Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bonn.

His first academic appointment in 1992 was joint between Mathematics and Operational Research at the London School of Economics. During that time be performed consulting in optimization for firms such as British Telecom, Rio Tinto, and Reuters. He was also codirector of the LSE Centre for Discrete and Applicable Mathematics and was co-founder (with Jean Fonlupt and Bernhard Korte) of the Discrete Optimization Network (DONET) which was a European initiative, lasting over a decade, supporting research and practice in optimization.

In 1997 he joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ where he designed algorithms and produced software which was deployed in products for optical network design, real-time network management, scheduling and internet measurement. He also maintained an interest in the fundamental theory behind these problems including his work with Tim Griffin and Gordon Wilfong which formulated a graph theory model to analyze the world's defacto interdomain routing protocol BOP.

Dr. Shepherd has spent leaves at the Theory Group of Microsoft Research, the Department of Computer Science, University of Washington (2011-12) and the Sauder School of Management, UBC (2014), as well as long-term visits to the Fields Institute, University of Bonn, DIMACS, and University of Tokyo. He currently sits on the board of two of the foremost journals in mathematical optimization: Mathematical Programming Series A where he is a coeditor, and Mathematical Programming Computation where he is an area editor.