Why all the media fuss over a demure MIT professor, wife and mother of two teen-age girls who, by every conceivable intellectual metric, is the antithesis of Paris Hilton? Because Barnhart is one of the world's foremost authorities on commercial aviation operations and their impact on passengers, and the media was clamoring for her expert opinion about an industry plagued by chronic airport delays in the wake of another heavy-travel weekend.

So what was going through her head that July 6 morning as she sat on the television set at Times Square Studios in New York City before millions of television viewers, waiting to take questions from the host of ABC's "Good Morning America"?

"I'm looking at the interviewer across from me and thinking, 'Whoa, he has so much makeup on. I wonder what he really looks like,' " Barnhart laughs. "And then I realized he's talking to me . . . I better start listening."

Once her appearance on GMA was over, Barnhart called home. Her oldest daughter answered.

"So, what did you think?" Barnhart asked her 15-year-old.

"I don't know, Mom," came the reply. "I didn't see it. I was sleeping."

Welcome to the real world of Cynthia Barnhart, who, by her own admission, would just as soon stay out of the limelight and let her research speak for itself than schmooze with polished media pros. Barnhart's reluctant brush with fame is heavy with irony, given that the collective O.R. profession has for decades decried the public's lack of recognition for O.R.'s "hidden" contributions to society (not to mention the fact that INFORMS spent something like $1 million in recent years promoting the profession through its "Science of Better" (SoB) marketing campaign). How many O.R. folks — academics and practitioners alike — would give up their laptop and favorite LP program for the opportunity to appear on GMA or any other network TV news show?

In another ironic twist, Barnhart has made promoting the profession a cornerstone of her presidency, only instead of targeting CEOs as the SoB campaign did, Barnhart aims to reach out to graduate, undergraduate and high school students with an aggressive education initiative. The goal: expose future leaders of America to O.R. as early as possible before they are captivated by something else. Along those lines, she has formed an ad hoc committee to address the education issue and help organize a series of presentations by prominent politicians, government officials and educators at the 2008 INFORMS annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in hopes of drawing widespread attention to the power and potential of O.R.

We sat down for the following chat with Barnhart during the INFORMS fall meeting in Seattle to find out more about her 15 minutes of fame, her expert insight on commercial aviation, her take on the state of the Institute, her vision for the future of the profession and — forgive us — what's on her iPod as she prepares to take the reins as president of INFORMS.

Two of Barnhart's professional interests — commercial aviation operations (opposite page) and INFORMS activities like meetings (above) — are drawing record crowds these days.

What motivated you to run for president of INFORMS? In your candidate statement, you indicated that marketing and education initiatives aimed at introducing O.R. to undergrads and high school students would be the cornerstone of your presidency.

While conducting a search for the dean at MIT last year, we kept coming back to the same question: Why don't more kids, especially girls, pursue careers in engineering? We can say O.R. instead of engineering because it's the same story. We surveyed high school kids who were good in math and science, and asked them if they wanted to become engineers, and they said no. So we asked them why not, and they said, we want to do something good for the world, we want to make a difference, we want to address important problems.

I think there's an incredible disconnect between what technical fields like O.R. are really about and the perception of it — not just by kids but by lots of people. So my approach is not so much to get the word out to let people know what operations research is, but rather to "just do it."

I've put together an ad hoc initiatives committee, and one of the things we're trying to do is showcase how O.R. can play a role in solving important problems for society. For the INFORMS 2008 meeting in Washington, we're putting together sessions to highlight this. We're still working on it, but the session topics we're looking at include energy and the environment, public health policy and transportation mobility. We're trying to get high-level policy-makers, as well as industry stakeholders, and some academics.

Those are our first initiatives aimed at: one, drawing people from within our community to hear about some applications of O.R. that they might be interested in, and, two, drawing people from outside our community in to see that O.R. can make a difference. We're also trying to engage the press. We'll videotape these sessions, place them on our Web site and use them to help launch a broader initiative.

The next step — again, we're trying to sort this out with the help of people within INFORMS — could be to have a student competition or challenge. The idea is to engage the INFORMS student chapters and have them perhaps identify problems within their community, local issues, that they will try to address. We will have these student groups, perhaps at an INFORMS meeting, present what they've done. These will be judged. The winners will be recognized, receive awards, present their work, and potentially publish their work in one of the INFORMS outlets. We want to take the outcome of this and use it to build an online repository of problem statements, data, case studies, videos. Academics, for example, could use some of this material and incorporate it into the subjects they are teaching.

The second thing that motivated me was some work I did with the Roundtable recently where we informally talked to people in industry who hire O.R. grads to identify areas where our grads might be falling short. What we found is we do a really good job in some areas of educating the students, and not so well in others. For example, we identified that students generally aren't very good at modeling, that is, hearing about a problem and coming up with a mathematical abstraction. They haven't had enough exposure to messy data, and how you formulate and model these problems — the very things in which our profession is supposed to be involved. The online repository is meant to address that issue.

You just answered half of my questions. This is clearly different than the Science of Better marketing campaign, which targeted CEOs and assorted C-level executives. You're talking about reaching talented students before they leave school, before their minds are made up regarding a career and the potential relevance and value of O.R. in that career.

Right. I have to say, part of my motivation is completely personal or selfish, however you want to look at it, because I have kids of my own ...

Are they mathematically inclined like you are?

The last thing they want to be is what I am. That's fine. It's not that I'm trying to convince them to be something different, but I see high school kids parading through my house, smart kids, who only think of engineers as nerds and geeks. They don't see how math can have a positive impact on the world. That's what I would like to change.

Young women tend to shy away from careers in math and science. Did you ever feel pressured not to excel in those subjects? What's going on?

I just did what I liked, and I liked math. It was easy for me so I did it. At some point, I was advised that I should pursue my math interests because there was potential for employment.

In the last 50 years, has any high school student ever said, "Gee, Mom, I want to be an operations researcher when I grow up"?

I suppose there might be an example somewhere in the world, but not many. At least thanks to initiatives like what Ken Chelst is doing [Wayne State University professor and INFORMS member Ken Chelst recently received a $3 million NSF grant to develop a fourth-year high school math course featuring O.R. concepts and content], high school students will have some idea what O.R. is. My daughter was doing her homework the other day and I said, "Wow, that's O.R.! You're doing O.R.!" She just looked at me. She had no idea what I was talking about.

The linkage I would like young students to make — and maybe with Ken's help it can happen — is for them to recognize that O.R. and math are relevant to some of their aspirations of making a difference. Kids believe they can make a difference. They want to make a difference. I would like them to believe that they can do it through O.R. and math, and not just by other means that they might now understand, like medicine.

I'm not clear on how you're going to reach these kids. We know Ken's program is funded to the tune of $3 million. What are you going to do without funding?

My first step is really aimed at the kids who are already in O.R. — the INFORMS student chapters. As a first step, we can highlight what you can accomplish in the real world with O.R. beyond the traditional things people think about. At some point, I'd like to expand this so that it's not just our INFORMS student chapters who are involved, but also high school students. But I'm taking it one step at a time.

The grad students are already captured and committed one way or another, aren't they?

Yes, they are committed. My emphasis is providing examples that show what you and O.R. can do to make a difference with a problem of interest to the community, whether it's with a food bank or any of the many community problems. The beauty of O.R. is that it is so broadly applicable. That's what we want to showcase — to students and our communities.

Marketing the profession might be the toughest problem in the world. The Science of Better campaign had mixed results at best and now seems to have cooled off. What's next?

I think cooled off is the right characterization, and now the marketing focus is shifting away from the Science of Better campaign.

To what? Does INFORMS have a new plan to market the profession?

We have a new marketing director [Gary Bennett] in place, new marketing staff, new consultants. They have a multi-pronged approach to marketing; it's not all-your-eggs-in-one-basket marketing of the profession. The board believes we need to diversify our approaches, so we're moving forward with our marketing with that in mind. Reaching out to grad students, undergraduates and high school students is one part of that diversified effort.

When you were running for president of INFORMS, what was the best advice you received?

Everyone kept saying the same thing: "Pick one thing that you want to do and focus on it because you absolutely can't do everything." I tried to listen to that. I picked a few things, but they are related.

So the theme of your presidency is "reaching out and teaching kids"?

Actually, the title I like is something we stole — with permission — from [Stanford professor and INFORMS member] Margaret Brandeau. Not so long ago, Margaret gave a plenary at an INFORMS meeting she called "Doing good with good O.R." That's the theme I'm trying to push and trying to market. That's the idea we will be pushing with the special sessions at the INFORMS 2008 meeting in Washington, D.C., we talked about earlier. We're trying to design it in a way that will have broad appeal and be newsworthy. I'm also trying to expose other O.R. people to the concept of "Doing good with good O.R.," starting with the student chapters. It's amazing how much exciting O.R. work is going on. We have many, many examples. I'm thinking of the work of our senior researchers like Larry Wein, Ed Kaplan, Margaret Brandeau. The list goes on and on.

The people you mentioned are not only incredibly talented in terms of their technical skills and problem framing, they can also effectively communicate their research to a non-technical world — perhaps the rarest O.R. skill of all. I'm wondering where communication skills ranked on the list of O.R. grads' weaknesses in your industry survey.

Communication was the number one issue in the surveys we conducted, so we are thinking of ways to address it. That's one of the reasons we want to have students involved in these competitions. They need to go out and make contacts outside of academia, they need to talk to the people who have the problems, they have to communicate, back and forth. These activities expose them to listening, hearing and translating what they hear into math and then being able to present their results so others can understand them. One of the most common complaints we heard from our industry surveys was, "There's too much O.R. speak." Too many O.R. grads don't know how to communicate with non-technical people. They say things like, "So, what's your binding constraint?" And they think that's English.

How do you solve that problem?

There are many ideas. At MIT, for example, we have a hands-on requirement. Ideally, you want every student working on a problem outside the university. Setting that up, though, requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. It's certainly do-able if you have lots of contacts, but it's hard to sustain, and some colleges and universities do it better than others. So we started thinking, within INFORMS, is there something we could do, because every university would find value in such a course. Could we put together an online, interactive course to address students' needs in terms of their mathematical modeling and communication skills?

The student competition you talked about — a Junior Edelman, if you will — would also address those issues.

That's correct. We're looking at a couple of models. The students could go into their local community and find their own problems to work on. Another model would be that we provide a single problem on which all of the different student groups work. If you had that model, you could say, "OK, who are the relevant people who need to discuss their viewpoints about what the problems are and share their expertise?" Then we could have Web-based discussions with these student groups. That means we do it once instead of each group having to find their own people and problem, the data, etc. It's not clear how we'll pull this off, but these are the kinds of ideas we're working on.

Speaking of communication, the media and public exposure, earlier this year all three major networks asked you to appear on their news shows to talk about aviation issues. Let's start with "Good Morning America."

It was an interesting experience. Someone from the show calls you in advance, asks you questions and sets it all up. Then they coach you before you go on in the morning, telling you what questions you will be asked. They do your hair and makeup. Then, just before the camera went live, the interviewer came over and said, "OK, I'm going to ask you this, this and this," and it was nothing like what my "coach" had told me. So I decided I just had to remain calm and listen carefully. I looked at the interviewer across from me and my initial thought was, "Whoa, he has so much makeup on! I wonder what he really looks like." And then I realized he was talking to me and I needed to start listening. So yes, it's a really different experience.

Did you enjoy it?

I actually don't like attention in that way. It was my 15 minutes of fame, and that was enough for me. It started when I was quoted in the New York Times and suddenly I became the "go-to" person for these kinds of interviews. One of my colleagues, when the Times article came out, said, "Finally, this work is being talked about. I never understood why it wasn't talked about before. It's really good that we can get this message out." Because of that, when ABC, NBC and CBS all called me on the same day, I said yes.

What was the reaction from family, friends and colleagues to your TV exposure?

I didn't tell anyone. I don't like that stuff, but my husband told people. When I was finished with the Good Morning America interview, I called home and asked my daughter what she thought and she said, "I don't know. I was sleeping. I just got up. I DVR'd it."

Thanks to record delays and packed planes, air travel today is a mostly miserable experience. Does O.R. have to take any responsibility for the misery since it tries to squeeze every dollar and all of the slack out of the system?

Two things are going on here. One is, yes, because of O.R., we have become really good at taking the slack out of the system and selling that last seat on a plane. We are at record load factors, which when combined with optimized schedules, means that when there are disruptions, it's trouble. There are no seats to re-accommodate passengers. It means really long waits for people.

But I think there's any even bigger problem, and I don't blame the airlines and I don't blame O.R. I blame the fact that we have a ridiculous system. Airlines can schedule as many flights as they want at all but four airports in the United States. That means we have more flights scheduled into our busiest airports than we have capacity to handle them in perfect weather. So as soon as you start to operate these flight schedules, things start to fall apart. If you have bad weather somewhere, not only will it affect airports where the weather is, it propagates throughout the network.

So what's the answer?

The answer is, we have to look more seriously at how we can manage demand at these congested airports. Lots of people have been talking about congestion pricing, auctions and administrative controls.

So it's going to cost me more to fly into LaGuardia?

The current system is unbelievably inefficient. Think of the number of delays. Like you said, it can be absolutely miserable to fly, and we're only going to see increased demand for aviation travel. How is this going to work? You say it's going to cost you more to fly, but it doesn't have to. What you see happening in recent years is a reduction in the average size of aircraft flying into these airports. What that means is in order to transport the same number of people, you need more flights into these airports. More flights into airports is not the direction we want to be going.

The airlines have opted for smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft. What's wrong with that?

As passengers, we want more frequency and more options, and the airlines have responded by offering more flights with smaller aircraft. The problem is, the system we have in place for landing fees is absolutely backwards. When a plane lands at an airport, they are charged on a weight basis: How much does the plane weigh? But the resource that you are trying to protect is runways, and whether you are a small plane or a big plane, you spend about the same amount of time on the runway. We're encouraging exactly the wrong kind of behavior. We need less frequent flights and bigger planes that move as many people as possible.

As an aviation operations expert who studies these things, where is all of this headed?

This is another great opportunity for operations research. With O.R., we can optimize individual airline schedules, but it's irrelevant when you are optimizing a piece of a very non-optimal system. It doesn't work. And the airlines have no incentive to do something that will help the system. If I, as an airline CEO, say, "Things are ridiculous at JFK. I'm going to cut down my schedule. I'm going to fly bigger planes. I'm going to help the situation," immediately another airline will say, "Great. I'm going in there. I'm going to have more frequency." Delays won't be improved, and you only hurt yourself. We must take O.R. expertise and apply it at the system-wide level. There are tremendous opportunities to influence policy in this way because we can show the impact of different policies.

It might not be in the airlines' best interest to have system-wide efficiency, but clearly it's in the federal government's best interest. So why aren't they listening to you?

It's been in the press. There is definite awareness of the problem at the national level, but you've got all these different groups staking out their territory. They have to find a balance between the interests of the FAA, the airports, general aviation, commercial airlines, legacy carriers, etc.

Are you working on a global solution?

We're working on a couple of things at MIT. We have a Global Airlines Industry program, which was funded by the Sloan Foundation and is now funded by a consortium of airlines, airports and industry stakeholders. We also have an NSF grant that we just got to look at reconfiguring the national air transportation system.

You can't build your way out of the problem. It takes years to build a runway like the one at ATL, let alone a major airport.

You're right. So we have a supply side focus and we have a demand side focus. We are going to have to manage both. And we're also focused on using information technology, computing and operations research to be very dynamic in how we manage the system. The supply side is not going to come from new infrastructure; it's got to come from new technologies and new O.R. models that more efficiently sequence plane arrivals and configure arrival and departures across the air transportation network.

So what do you like to do when you're not teaching, researching, solving complex aviation problems or appearing on network news shows?

I have a lot of things I like to do. We're avid skiers. My husband and I grew up in Vermont, so we love to ski along with the kids. We love to hike. I try to run a half-marathon every year, but I don't have time to train. The one exercise thing that I stick with is yoga. One of my neighbors teaches yoga to a group of us. My girls are skiers, soccer players, field hockey players and track runners.

Forget the O.R. cocktail party question. I've always wanted to ask someone the Rolling Stone magazine question: What's on your iPod?

What's on my iPod is what's on my kids' iPod because we have one iTunes account and all the music they download automatically shows up on my iPod. I listen to a lot of what they listen to. I like Bob Dylan. I find my taste in music hasn't changed much from my college days, although I've diversified a little because one of my daughters likes country music. Rap I have more trouble with.

Enough fun. Back to business. From your perspective, what's the state of INFORMS and the profession?

There's lots of good news. Our meetings are breaking attendance records. The Institute is strong financially. We're in this great place for O.R. in that more and more data is available to us. There are greater computing capabilities than ever before. In theory, every day of every year we can be more effective in solving real problems. It's amazing the difference in our capabilities within the last five years. That's all really good. The other thing that's great for O.R. and maybe also is pointing to one of the issues people raise is its pervasiveness. The great thing about O.R. is that it applies to a broad set of topic areas and problems. Perhaps that's why we have some trouble defining it.

Seth Bonder gave a plenary on that very subject at this conference and made the case for renaming the profession. He pointed out that "operations research" has something like 100 aliases so no one knows what it is. Your thoughts?

For me, it's a point I don't even want to get involved with right now. I want to spend my time and energy in other ways rather than worrying about the name. I look at it like that Nike commercial: "Just do it." Someone else may solve the name problem, but it's probably not something I'll accomplish in my term.

So how do you answer the cocktail party question: So, what do you do?

I do the cocktail thing the same way I do the press thing; I deflect it. I say I'm a professor. Honestly, any attempts I've made to explain O.R. result in a very quick exit by the questioning party.

Anything else out there on the horizon that concerns you regarding INFORMS or the profession? Membership is flat.

I think the issue of flat membership can be impacted by the idea that we're trying to get out there: You can do good with good O.R. That's why I like that title. It's not just public policy. It can be almost anything.

Doing good with good O.R. implies some sort of social conscience.

I'm sure that's the context Margaret put it, but if you work with your local community to streamline one of their needs, it could be almost anything. That's why I included transportation and mobility in my list of topics, because I view that as doing good with good O.R. While it has many implications for airlines and other businesses, the focus, for me, is about this whole passenger-centric idea. That's not to say that I'm not paying attention to the airlines and all the other stakeholders.

You're looking out for the passengers?

That is the current focus. Most of my work has been with the airlines and helping them to optimize their operations. Part of what we started looking at is the DOT metric of on-time performance. It's a metric aimed at helping passengers understand the quality of service, but it's a really bad metric. It's not indicative — it's not even necessarily correlated — with performance because it only measures whether or not the plane's on time. If you're not on the plane, it doesn't tell how you're going to fare in the system. So the focus of our work is to highlight that the issue isn't so much that the planes are late; it's the fact that you miss a connection or your flight is canceled and now you have to fly a different itinerary. The delays passengers experience are not reflected by the delays planes experience.

And there has to be a better way of screening passengers.

I view that as another opportunity of doing good with good O.R.

Any more comments about women in O.R.?

First of all, and I don't have the data but I'll say this anyway. I think that if we make a strong case for "doing good with good O.R." that it will disproportionately affect women's O.R. career choices. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's something I think about and some of the studies I've seen indicate that there might be some truth to this conjecture. The thing that worries me — and this is both women and men — especially in academia, is what we're doing to junior faculty. They are really stressed out. I talk to my students, I talk to other professors who talk to their students, and we all hear the same thing: We don't want to be in your shoes. We don't want to follow your trajectory. We're seeing more efforts to attract more women to academia and O.R., but we're not particularly successful because we're losing them somewhere along the way.

Is the job that stressful?

It's a different kind of stress. People who don't like to do more than one thing at a time really have trouble juggling all of the demands on their time.

A year from now, how will you measure the success of your term as president?

As I look at the current trajectory of the Institute and all of its dimensions — meetings, journals, etc. that are doing quite well — if we continued to follow that trajectory, that will be one success. So part of my answer is, "Do no harm." Secondly, if we make some advancements and generate some excitement about increasing the visibility of O.R. with the "doing good with good O.R." theme, that will be a success. I really hope that at this time next year, we will be ending the conference in Washington and these special sessions will have been a hit, that we will have attracted the press, and that we will have excited people inside and outside our community about the potential for O.R. to make a difference in the important problems we all care about.

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