10th Anniversary Celebration
About ORFE
Welcome to the Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering, part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. ORFE is engineering for business, commerce, and industry.
Our students are innovators and entrepreneurs. They acquire the skills to become leaders in finance, information technology, management consulting, operations planning and insurance. Our researchers develop tools used to make better decisions, improve performance of complex systems, and manage resources efficiently.
The Department was formed in 1999 and traces a distinguished history to activities at Princeton between 1930 and 1960.
Optimal Learning for Drug Discovery in Ewing's Sarcoma claims Honors
Diana Negoescu '09 and Peter Frazier *09 have received honorable mention in the first 'Doing Good with Good OR' competition sponsored by Informs. The competition recognizes students or student groups whose projects are likely to have a significant impact on society through the application of operations research methods. Their project addressed the problem of sequencing the testing of different compounds in the search for drugs to effectively treat Ewing's Sarcoma. See the Doing Good with Good OR page for more information about the student competition, or the announcement, slide presentation and related readings on the research group's page.
Pupils Go Paperless in ORF405
"84 students in ORF 405: Regression & Applied Time Series are trying to do away with paper entirely. … professor Rene Carmona, who teaches ORF 405, has eliminated the use of paper in his course by assigning problem sets on the computer and having students submit them through Blackboard. Graders give feedback on the homework by writing on electronic tablets that are linked to the computer."
Carmona Calculates a Cooler Planet
"In recent months, [Prof. René] Carmona, the Paul Wythes '55 Professor of Engineering and Finance, has leveraged his expertise in the mathematical modeling of financial markets and other complex systems to develop models to guide cap-and-trade policies intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
'It's a very politically charged issue,' said Carmona, who also is a professor of operations research and financial engineering. 'My intention is to demystify cap-and-trade and at the same time understand its weaknesses and loopholes. There have been mistakes in the past, yet our research shows that a cap-and-trade system can work. But only if you do it right.'"