Radhika Vidyadhar Kulkarni (born 1956) [1] is a retired Indian and American operations researcher, [2] and the 2022 president of INFORMS. [3]
The Bechhofer–Kulkarni selection procedure or Bechhofer–Kulkarni stopping rule, a stopping rule for maximization in Bernoulli processes, is named after her work with her doctoral advisor, Robert E. Bechhofer. [4] [5]
After earning a master's degree in mathematics at IIT Delhi, [2] Kulkarni went to Cornell University intending to do doctoral research in pure mathematics, but switched to operations research after taking a mathematical programming course in her first year. [6] She earned a second master's degree in 1979 and completed her Ph.D. in 1981. [2] Her doctoral supervisor was Robert E. Bechhofer. [7]
She worked for 35 years at the SAS Institute, including ten years as Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D. [2] She is the 2022 president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). [3]
Kulkarni was the 2006 winner of the WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS of INFORMS. [8] In 2014 she was named a Fellow of INFORMS. [8] [9]
Kulkarni married Vidyadhar Kulkarni, another student of operations research at Cornell and later the chair of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of North Carolina. [7]