Ariela Sofer is Associate Dean for Administration and Faculty Affairs in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University.  Previously she served close to 16 years (2002-2017) as Chair of the Systems Engineering and Operations Research (SEOR) Department at Mason.  Dr, Sofer received the B.Sc. in mathematics, and the M.Sc. in operations research from the Technion in Israel. She received the D.Sc. degree in operations research from the George Washington University in 1984 and joined Mason upon graduation.   Her major areas of interest are nonlinear optimization, optimization in medical applications and systems thinking.    Dr. Sofer is currently the Academic Director of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).  She has previously served as the Secretary of the Institute for Industrial and Systems Engineering (IISE), as Vice President for Sections and Societies of The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), and as President of the Association of Chairs of Operations Research Departments (ACORD). She has also served as Chair of the INFORMS Computing Society and as Secretary/ Treasurer of the SIAM Special Interest Group on Optimization  SIAG/OPT. She is a member of the editorial board of the SEBoK Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge. She has served as Associate Editor of the Operations Research Journal, and for Management Science, and a member of the editorial Board of MOS-SIAM Book Series on Optimization. She was co-chair of the SIAM Conference on Optimization held in 2002 in Toronto Canada, and co-chair of the 3rd International Conference on Model-Based Systems Engineering held in Fairfax, Virginia, 2010. She has been affiliated with the Simulation Group in the Department of Radiology, at Georgetown University Medical Center. She is coauthor of the textbook “Linear and Nonlinear Optimization”, published by SIAM Books in 2008 (and in an earlier edition by McGraw Hill, 1996). She was elected as Fellow of INFORMS (2016) and as Fellow of IISE (2018).