Authors' Biographies
Muhammad El-Taha, received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Haigazian College in 1978, the M.S. degree in statistics from the American University
of Beirut in 1980, and the Ph.D. in operations research from North Carolina State University in 1987.
He is currently a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Southern Maine where he has been since 1987. He is also an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department. He has held visiting scholar positions at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique-Telecommunications (INRS), Canada.
He was a statistical analyst for Arabia Insurance Company from 1980-82.
Dr. El-Taha's research interests are in modeling and analysis of stochastic systems. He is particularly interested in queueing networks and
their applications in telecommunications, computer and communications networks, and manufacturing with special emphasis on sample-path analysis of queues and other stochastic systems. He is also interested in statistical analysis.
He teaches system simulation, queueing networks, stochastic modeling, linear programming, and probability and statistics among other topics.
Shaler Stidham, Jr., received the B.A. degree in
mathematics from Harvard
University in 1963, the M.S. degree in operations research and computing from
Case Institute of Technology in 1964, and the Ph.D. degree in operations
research from Stanford University in 1968.
He is currently a professor in the Department of Operations Research
at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was Chair of the
Department of Operations Research from 1990-95. Previously he held faculty
positions at Cornell University and N.C. State University. He has held
visiting positions at Stanford University, University of Aarhus (Denmark),
the Technical University of Denmark, Bell Laboratories, University of
Cambridge (UK), and INRIA, Sophia Antipolis (France). He is an Overseas
Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Dr. Stidham's research and publications are primarily in distribution-free
analysis and the design and
control of queueing systems, with an emphasis on applications to
communications. He has been an associate editor of {\em Management Science}
and {\em Operations Research}, Area Editor for Stochastic Processes for
{\em Operations Research}, and is currently an associate editor of
{\em QUESTA}.
He was program co-chair of the Conference on Applied Probability (Chapel
Hill, 1988) and the TIMS XXIX International Meeting (Osaka, 1989). In
1990-91 he served as chair of the TIMS/ORSA College/Technical Section on
Applied Probability.