Lawrence V. Snyder

Lawrence V. Snyder (known professionally as Larry Snyder) is an American industrial engineer and operations researcher whose work focuses on supply chain optimization, logistics, stochastic optimization, and decision-making under uncertainty. He is the Harvey E. Wagner Endowed Chair Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University and serves as the university's Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs.

Early life and education

Snyder earned a B.A. in mathematics from Amherst College in May 1996, completing an honors thesis titled Combinatorial Rigidity and the Path Decomposition of Isostatic Graphs under advisors Ruth Haas and Norton Starr. He subsequently earned an M.S. (1999) and a Ph.D. (2003) in industrial engineering and management sciences from Northwestern University. His doctoral dissertation, Supply Chain Robustness: Models and Algorithms, was supervised by Mark S. Daskin, with Collette Coullard, Karen Smilowitz, and Chung-Piaw Teo serving on his dissertation committee.

Career

Snyder joined the faculty of Lehigh University's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and was appointed to the Harvey E. Wagner Endowed Chair in Manufacturing Systems Engineering effective July 1, 2022. In June 2023, he was named Lehigh's Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, a role in which he works with the provost's office, deans, and department chairs on faculty hiring, promotion, tenure, and related policy.

Snyder served as co-director and then director of Lehigh's Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation (I-DISC) from 2019 to 2023. He has also served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Transportation Science, IISE Transactions, and Omega, as well as the Wiley Series on Operations Research and Management Science.

Research

Snyder's work has examined how retailers can reduce inventory costs by integrating physical stores with centralized distribution and e-commerce fulfillment, modeling how demand uncertainty affects the amount of inventory a multi-channel retailer needs to hold. His research on machine learning approaches to supply chain decision-making, including a project applying deep learning to classic inventory problems, has been supported by National Science Foundation grants.

Selected publications

Snyder is co-author, with Zuo-Jun Max Shen of Fundamentals of Supply Chain Theory a textbook first published by Wiley in 2011; a second edition, expanded with new chapters on vehicle routing and integrated supply chain models, was published in 2019.

Books

• Snyder, Lawrence V.; Shen, Zuo-Jun Max (2019). Fundamentals of Supply Chain Theory (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-119-02497-2
• Snyder, Lawrence V. (2018). The Opex Analytics Weekly Puzzle: A Collection of Puzzles Using Math, Operations Research, Computer Science, Probability and Logic.ISBN 9781731343642

Honors and awards

Snyder was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), the highest classification of IISE membership, as part of the organization's 2024 class of honorees recognized at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo in Montreal.