Dr. Zelda B. Zabinsky is a Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in the departments of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has published numerous papers in the areas of global optimization, algorithm complexity, and optimal design of composite structures. She received an Erskine Fellowship from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand to collaborate internationally on global optimization methods. Her book, Stochastic Adaptive Search in Global Optimization, 2003, describes research on theory and practice of algorithms useful for solving problems with multimodal objective functions in high dimension. The National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security, NASA-Langley, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company have funded her research, as well as local industries including Microsoft, Genie, Solectron and the Port of Tacoma. She has participated in developing software currently in use at Boeing to aid engineers in optimizing the design of fuselage panels made of advanced composite materials. She has also performed research on optimization of air traffic flow management, where the objective function is not only multimodal, but incorporates probabilistic effects as well. Her work on optimization models under uncertainty have been applied to the supplier selection problem, and more recently to the preparedness planning and real-time response for the allocation and distribution of medical supplies in the event of a natural disaster. Other application areas include transportation, forestry, health care, structural optimization and manufacturing. Professor Zabinsky is an IIE Fellow, and is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Global Optimization, and a board member of the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). She teaches courses in Operations Research and has received the annual teaching award in Industrial Engineering at the University of Washington several times.