Karen Renee Smilowitz is an American transportation scientist and operations researcher whose research concerns humanitarian logistics,[1][2] including vehicle routing for disaster relief efforts,[3] as well as safety and emergency preparedness for large public events such as marathons.
She went to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study in civil and environmental engineering, specializing in transportation, earning a master's degree in 1998 and completing her Ph.D. in 2001.
[6] Her dissertation, Design and operation of multimode, multi-service logistics systems, was supervised by Carlos F.
[6] Smilowitz was the 2016 winner of the WORMS Award for the Advancement of Women in OR/MS of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
[8] In 2022 she was named a Fellow of INFORMS, "for outstanding research in transportation, logistics and nonprofit operations, significant contributions to the practice of OR for social good and advancing equity and diversity".