Dr. Richard C Larson

Professor Larson’s career has focused his operations research and systems expertise on a wide variety of problems, in both public and private sectors. He is author, co-author or editor of six books and author or co-author of over 175 scientific articles, primarily in the fields of urban service systems (esp. emergency response systems), disaster planning, pandemics, queueing, logistics, technology-enabled education, smart-energy houses and workforce planning. His first book, Urban Police Patrol Analysis (MIT Press, 1972) was awarded the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA). He is co-author, with Amedeo Odoni, of the widely used Urban Operations Research, Prentice Hall, 1981 (over 1,000 citations). Larson’s research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques (e.g., the Queue Inference Engine – an early example of data-driven research and the Hypercube Queueing Model – 740 citations), but has also been covered extensively in national and international media.