Berkeley IEOR Honors Professor Alper Atamturk for His Leadership as Department Chair

Alper Atamturk Headshot
Alper Atamturk

The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley (Berkeley IEOR) extends its gratitude to Professor Alper Atamturk for his exemplary leadership and dedicated service as department chair from January 1, 2021, to June 30, 2025. Over his 4.5-year tenure, Professor Atamturk guided the department through a period marked by both extraordinary challenges and transformative growth.

Atamturk began his tenure during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when classes were still being held remotely. In the years that followed, he successfully steered the department through numerous complex challenges while continuing to set new strategic priorities and leading efforts to modernize and expand IEOR’s research and education programs. These initiatives resulted in more than doubling of student enrollments at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and continual increase in national rankings each year. Under his leadership, the department expanded its outreach efforts, launching summer programs for high school students and community college faculty. Notably, the department reached gender parity among its students, an exceptional achievement for an engineering discipline. 

During Atamturk’s tenure, IEOR significantly grew its faculty and staff, hiring six new faculty members and nine staff members, while also promoting several early-career faculty. Atamturk also launched the UC Berkeley Master of Analytics program, serving as its director. The program has quickly emerged as a globally recognized leader in advanced analytics education, preparing the next generation of industry leaders and professionals in data-driven decision-making. 

Professor Atamturk has helped raise over $30 million in donor funding to advance key departmental priorities, including the creation of two endowed chairs, six new graduate fellowships and a distinguished lecture series in IEOR. He also played a pivotal role in the establishment of the NSF-funded National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT), where he serves as the UC Berkeley site director.

In recognition of his research achievements, Atamturk was awarded the 2023 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The award honors his outstanding work in algorithm design for integer programming, nonconvex optimization, and optimization under uncertainty. Professor Atamturk holds the Earl J. Isaac Chair in the Science and Analysis of Decision Making.

On June 25, IEOR faculty and staff gathered in the Etcheverry Hall conference room to celebrate Atamturk’s service and leadership. Assistant Professor Thibaut Mastrolia remarked, “Alper has been an exceptionally effective chair. He led with humility, support and purpose, always putting the success of his colleagues and the department first.”

Professor Xin Guo will succeed Atamturk as department chair. A member of the IEOR faculty since 2006, Guo holds the Coleman Fung Chair in Financial Modeling. She is an academic scholar at Amazon, co-founder of Women in Financial Engineering, and has published over 60 research papers and the book Quantitative Trading: Algorithms, Analytics, Data, Models, Optimization (Chapman & Hall, 2016). Xin has advised more than 40 graduate students and received the UC Chancellor’s Research Award. She also founded the Fintech concentration within the IEOR Master of Engineering program.

“We are deeply grateful to Professor Atamturk for his leadership and unwavering commitment to the IEOR community,” said Tsu-Jae King Liu, outgoing Dean of Berkeley Engineering. “I am confident that Professor Xin Guo will build on this strong foundation and continue to advance the department’s excellence in research, education, and societal impact.”