I'm so excited to be joined by someone whose name is deeply woven into the fabric of the INFORMS community – Dr. Jim Cochran, Professor of Applied Statistics and the Mike & Kathy Morone Research Chair at the University of Alabama's Culverhouse College of Business. Jim is a longtime INFORMS member, past recipient of the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice and INFORMS Presidents Award, and a Fellow of INFORMS, the American Statistical Association, and the African Academy of Sciences, and a tireless advocate for analytics education, international collaboration, and community engagement. He's attended more INFORMS meetings than most of us can count – and today we're talking about what has changed, what has stayed the same, and why INFORMS remains such a meaningful home for so many members like Jim.

We close out another terrific year of Resoundingly Human podcasts with our 2025 INFORMS President Dave Hunt, for a look back over his time as president, milestones, and what activities he's looking forward to getting back to in 2026.

In this episode, we're continuing our special relaunch series by welcoming one of this year's INFORMS Annual Meeting plenary speakers – a pioneer in the fusion of machine learning and optimization, and a leader in advancing AI for real-world engineering challenges.

Pascal Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of INFORMS and AAAI, and has made groundbreaking contributions to constraint programming and optimization systems that are still used in industry decades later. His current research focuses on integrating AI with mathematical optimization to solve incredibly complex and large-scale problems in energy, transportation, supply chains, and more.

At the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting, he delivered a plenary address titled "Learning to Optimize: Foundations and Industrial Impact," exploring how machine learning and optimization can work hand-in-hand to meet real-time demands in today's dynamic systems.