Doug Samuelson - 1965 Scholar

Douglas A. Samuelson (Nevada, 1965) describes himself as “one of the Scholars who actually tried to do what President Johnson urged us to do: improve our society.”  He adds, “I’ve been mostly unsuccessful at that, but at least I gave it a good try.  There were a few little milestones here and there.”

Well, yes, here and there.  After college at Cal – Berkeley, he moved to Washington, DC in 1975 to become a Federal policy analyst.  In that role, in 1980, he played a significant analytical role in the US v. Exxon price regulation case that depended on determining when “a significant change in producing patterns” had occurred in a large oil field.  The resulting verdict, over $2 billion, was the largest in the history of the Federal civil courts at the time.

Also around that time, working for the Department of Energy’s Office of Special Counsel for Compliance, he performed “by far the most important task of my life.”  Iraq had just invaded Iran, and it was critical to the US response to know how much oil inventory the Western world had.  “After I got an answer, I carefully reassessed assumptions. I noted, ‘if the Saudis increase their production by ten percent, which they easily could, those two countries could fight for years without much harmful effect on supply.’ That’s why the US didn’t intervene, and that probably averted escalation into a major war.” 

In Washington, he resumed his education, earning a master’s degree (1981) and doctorate (1990) in Operations Research from The George Washington University.

He also became active in a number of human rights advocacy activities, mostly as one of the founding members (1979) and later as chair (1985-88) of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights.  He co-edited “Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight” in 1992 and “Health Information and Ethics: Protecting Fundamental Human Rights” in 1997.  The former book included what proved to be a highly influential chapter he wrote with one co-author, Herbert F. Spirer, on how to use distorted and missing data to make inferences about human rights violations.  This chapter proved to be instrumental in Spirer’s developing programs to train human rights monitors all over the world.

As a later offshoot of his human rights work, Samuelson proposed the method to estimate the costs of unexploded land mines.  The leaders of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines credited this quantitative work as critical to getting their advocacy adopted, resulting in the International Treaty to Ban Landmines in 1997. This treaty won its advocates the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.  “Between the Landmines Treaty and the Iran-Iraq war thing, I may have had a small role in saving over a hundred million lives,” he muses. “So maybe that’s a little something.”

In 1983, he left the Federal government to try entrepreneurship.  He co-founded a company that became one of the industry leaders in computerized outbound telephone call centers. As part of this effort, he invented predictive dialing, the industry-transforming method to time call attempts to keep representatives busy while drastically reducing nuisance calls.  Samuelson holds several patents for systems for regulating arrivals of customers to servers, especially relating to predictive dialing.  The first one, the basis for predictive dialing, was foundational, having been referenced, as of this writing (in late 2021), by 59 other patents.  The company went on to a multimillion-dollar buyout in 1993. 

Doug is president and owner of InfoLogix Inc. in Annandale, Virginia,  founded in 1988. Providing consulting services to clients in such matters of disaster response and preparedness, health care policy and wargaming, he has worked in a number of defense and intelligence venues. Dr. Samuelson has also done teaching and research at several institutions, including Memphis State University, the George Washington University, George Mason University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the years, he has been successful as a writer as well.  He wrote “The ORacle,” the longest-running (1986-2018) and most widely read column in the history of the OR / MS profession. He has also published more than 100 book chapters, refereed articles, and feature articles.   

A respected member of several industry-related organizations, Samuelson is affiliated with Omega Rho (O.R. honorary) and the Military Operations Research Society. He is on the anti-racism taskforce for the American Statistical Association.

In 2006, Samuelson was honored with a SAS Silver Circle Achievement Award. He has been featured in approximately 25 editions of Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering and Who’s Who in the World.

Since 2016, he has served on the advisory board for the Health Services Agencies of Northern Virginia. He is now first vice chair.  He has been working on improved methods of predicting epidemic spread.

He was married (to Fran, from Pittsburgh) from 1979 through 2002 and has two grown children, Andy and Diane.