Manuel Laguna is the Director of Global Initiatives and the MediaOne Professor of Management Science at the Leeds School of Business of the University of Colorado Boulder. He started his academic career at the University of Colorado in 1990, after receiving master’s (1987) and doctoral (1990) degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence and operations research, resulting in over one hundred publications, including four books. He has received research funding from private industry and government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Environmental Protection Agency. Manuel is also a co-founder of OptTek Systems, a Boulder-based software and consulting company that provides optimization solutions. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Heuristics and has been Division Chair, Senior Associate Dean and Interim Dean at the Leeds School of Business.