Judith Liebman
Judith S. Liebman (July 2, 1936 – July 8, 2023) was an American operations researcher, civil engineer, and mechanical engineer. She was a professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the only female president of the Operations Research Society of America (now INFORMS). Education and career Liebman was interested in science as a child, and was inspired by a biography of Marie Curie. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Colorado in 1958. She then worked as an engineer and programmer at Convair Astronautics, General Electric, and the chemistry department of Cornell University, where her husband was pursuing a degree in environmental engineering. At Cornell, she began taking courses in operations research, and when her husband moved to Johns Hopkins University as a new faculty member, she moved with him and began graduate study there. She completed a Ph.D. in operations research at Johns Hopkins in 1971. She stayed at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor of public health administration, and operations research, but in 1972 she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a major appointment in the Department of Civil Engineering and a minor appointment in Mechanical and Industrial