Craig Tovey

Craig Tovey serves as a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-directs the Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID). His interdisciplinary work bridges engineering, biology, and social sciences with significant contributions to sustainability and complex systems.

His educational foundation includes:

• A.B. Magna Cum Laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University (1977)
• M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1981)
• Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University (1981)

Dr. Tovey's research centers on operations research applied to social and natural systems, with critical focus on sustainability, energy, and environmental systems. His current investigations span inverse optimization for electric grid management, biomimetic algorithms for robotics and web infrastructure, animal collective behavior (particularly honey bees and fire ants), sustainability metrics, and political polarization dynamics. His work consistently demonstrates how biological principles can solve engineering challenges through biologically inspired design.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals three dominant research trajectories: (1) computational social choice and spatial voting theory addressing political polarization and election control; (2) biologically inspired algorithms derived from animal behavior for robotics and distributed systems; and (3) optimization techniques applied to energy grids and sustainability measurement. These threads interconnect through his core methodology of extracting mathematical principles from natural systems.

His distinguished honors include:

• Presidential Young Investigator Award (1985)
• Jacob Wolfowitz Prize (1989)
• National Research Council Senior Associateship (1990)
• Georgia Tech Institute Fellow (1994)
• Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Award (2011)
• ACM SIGecon Test of Time Award (2016)
• Golden Goose Award (2016) for honey bee foraging research

As an educator and research leader, Dr. Tovey has mentored numerous graduate students and secured substantial funding for interdisciplinary projects. His Golden Goose Award-winning work on honey bee algorithms demonstrates how fundamental biological research yields practical engineering solutions for internet server allocation. His research has consistently bridged theoretical computer science with real-world applications.

Dr. Tovey co-directs the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID), which integrates faculty from engineering, biology, and design disciplines. The center's flagship projects include the Honey Bee Algorithm for web server management and fire ant collective behavior studies that inform resilient swarm robotics. CBID's work exemplifies how biological systems provide robust solutions for engineering challenges in optimization, distributed control, and adaptive systems.