Magnanti served as the founding president of the Singapore University of Technology and Design from 2009 to 2017.
Magnanti received an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Syracuse University College of Engineering and Computer Science (1967)[1] and master's degrees in both Statistics (1969) and Mathematics (1971) from Stanford University, where he also received his doctorate in Operations Research (1972).
[2] His dissertation, Independence Systems and Combinatorial Optimization, was supervised by George Dantzig.
He has served on thesis committees for approximately 70 doctoral students, supervising over 25; his students have included Anantaram Balakrishnan, Bruce L. Golden, Janny Leung, and Georgia Perakis.
He has also won the MIT Billard Award and ORSA George E. Kimball Medal for distinguished service.