Professor and Gary C. Fethke Chair in Leadership Kurt Anstreicher has been named a 2020 recipient of the prestigious Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence.

Anstreicher is a professor of Business Analytics at the Tippie College of Business and holds two complimentary appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering at the University of Iowa.

The Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence is one of Iowa’s highest honors for faculty achievement and only six faculty members across the entire university receive it each year. It is a testament to Anstreicher’s accomplishments in teaching, scholarship, professional commitment, and service to the university. Because he was chosen by a selection committee on the University of Iowa’s faculty senate, it also shows his colleague’s high regard for his contributions to the academic community.

“Throughout Kurt’s research, you can see a deep interest in the mathematics of optimization, and he always strives to the answer the important practical questions: are we really solving the problem we care about; are we using expensive computing resources wisely; what is the next obstacle?” said Anstreicher’s colleague, George Daly Professor of Business Analytics Sam Burer. “Kurt also believes that the algorithms need to be good, not just useful, i.e., they need to be well researched and their behavior should be transparent to their users. These are guiding principles that we need now more than ever.”

Anstreicher earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1978 and a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1983. His areas of interest in research include interior-point algorithms, linear and nonlinear programming, and nonlinear integer programming. He has presented his research all over the world and been printed in publications such as Operations Research, Journal of Global Optimization, and the SIAM Journal on Optimization.  He has also been an elected fellow with INFORMS and a fellow with the CIC Academic Leadership Program (ALP) since 2011.

His previous awards include: Outstanding First-Year Instructor, Des Moines Executive MBA Program (2015), three G.R.E.A.T. Teaching Awards, Executive MBA Program (2002, 2003, 2004), and the prize for best paper in optimization from the SIAM Interest Group on Optimization (2002).

Anstreicher will receive his award at the annual fall Faculty and Staff Award Ceremony on October 13, 2020.