Dr. Chaiken's career of more than 25 years of serving the public interest led to INFORMS presentation of the President's Award. In 1994, he was named by President Clinton to be the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that position, he has been instrumental in bringing modern web-based technology to making BJS data widely and readily available for the public and for the research community. He has also led the efforts to implement effective and rapid interchange of criminal history information and to develop effective computerized tracking of offenders through the federal criminal justice system.
He was an early participant in the pioneering work of the New York City RAND Institute in the late 1960s, where he worked on fire department deployment problems and made important contributions to the allocation of police patrol vehicles. He moved to RAND in Santa Monica in 1972 and became a major participant in the work of RAND in criminal justice. He pursued research on modeling the criminal justice system, studies of the criminal investigation process, and analysis of criminal careers. He left RAND for Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1984, and was an important participant in many aspects of their work, including the development of the FBI's incident-based crime reporting system, which is now being implemented by an increasing number of police departments.
Dr. Chaiken's background is in mathematics. His Ph.D. is from MIT and he taught at Cornell and UCLA. He has been a long-time member of INFORMS and its predecessor organizations, the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS).
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.