“Craig has a sustained record of contributions to this field, and this professorship appointment provides a well-deserved opportunity to enhance his research and educational impacts,” said Jane Ammons, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in ISyE.

Tovey received his A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, and sustainability measurement.

Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011.