Michael Ferris–Looking Back

Dr. Michael Ferris is “an optimizer through and through”–which is why he’ll keep optimizing even after his retirement in summer 2026.  

For Dr. Ferris, one of the founding five faculty at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), much of the excitement of his work has come from the chance to learn the vocabularies and requirements of new systems and industries, from tomotherapy to manufacturing Pringles cans and facilitating fish spawning in waterways. 

He has also shared his expertise to benefit the public in significant ways–including working with policymakers to help distribute the first Covid vaccines fairly and efficiently in the state of Wisconsin. He consults with industries and companies such as Exact Sciences, energy modeling, agriculture, trucking, and manufacturing, and will continue to do so after retirement, when he will remain a WID emeritus. 

“I have that thirst for finding out about your problem,” Ferris says, “and seeing how I can impact your problem with things that I know how to do and how I can learn from you techniques that might improve what I do.” 

At one point, Ferris saw an opportunity to optimize his own consultations with students and other researchers. “You’d understand what the problem was, maybe what the key features were, and then you’d say, well, here’s the next step… but you need to now go away and collect the data. You need to actually formulate the model and then write some code that actually sucks in that data, runs the thing, and then looks at the answers. And that whole process of going from idea to solution was not very efficient,” Ferris explains. In response, he developed algorithms for others to use, plus new courses and methods to make those tools more accessible and available.  

A lifelong lover of games and an early adopter of games as teaching tools, Dr. Ferris is currently looking forward to more Chutes & Ladders with his granddaughter. 

Dr. Ferris is the John P. Morgridge Chair in Computer Sciences & Jacques-Louis Lions Professor of Computer Sciences,  and (by courtesy) Mathematics and Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has spent 30 years at UW and 15 of them at WID, where he served as director of the Data Sciences Hub and Hub Central. Ferris’s honors and awards include the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize from the Mathematical Programming Society, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and SIAM, INFORMS and Guggenheim fellowships.