Timothy Lowe, professor emeritus and Chester A. Phillips Professor of Operations Management, was recently profiled in an oral histories video by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). INFORMS is the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals.

Lowe is interviewed by Kurt Anstreicher, professor and Gary C. Fethke Chair in Leadership at the Tippie College of Business. The two spoke about Lowe’s life and work in the field of operations research. They discuss Lowe’s family and early life, his education, career mentors, working at Exxon and the U.S. Army, how a former student encouraged him to go to graduate school, how operations research has changed, and his passion for restoring old cars.  

Lowe was elected as an INFORMS Fellow in 2007. According to INFORMS, fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. The institute also honored Lowe as a Franz Edelman Laureate in 2002 for the collaborative paper “Managing the Seed-Corn Supply Chain at Syngenta.”

Lowe was a professor at the University of Iowa from 1989 to 2016. His operations research focuses on supply chain management, production/operations management, mathematical programming theory and applications, and facility location/design and logistics.