INFORMS Pacific Northwest Chapter Kicks Off 2026 with cutting edge Industry Insights
Seattle, WA
May 30, 2026
The INFORMS Pacific Northwest Chapter held its quarterly meet-and-greet on May 28 that signaled an ambitious year ahead for the analytics, data science and operations research community in the region.
Chapter President, Dharmateja Uddandarao, introduced the 2026 Board Members and unveiled a 2026 roadmap featuring quarterly chapter summits and two annual regional conferences, a notable expansion of programming designed to deepen practitioner engagement across the Pacific Northwest region including Oregon, Washington in USA and British Columbia in Canada. The newly elected chapter officers include Shamnad Shaffi as Vice President and Rohit Nagpal as Treasurer. The chapter board also welcomes Samridhi as Marketing Chair. Dharmateja then introduced Apoorv Mathur, who led the evening’s featured talk.
Apoorv, Product Manager at Siemens, presented on “Decision Intelligence in Power Systems.” Mr. Mathur outlined how today’s electricity grid which are strained by surging AI-driven demand, variable renewables, and distributed energy resources relies on a sophisticated interplay of forecasting, simulation, optimization, and AI to deliver actionable decisions within seconds.
His presentation underscored a critical challenge facing modern infrastructure: balancing accuracy, robustness, interpretability, and computational speed while maintaining operator trust. Mr. Mathur noted that many of the decision-intelligence frameworks pioneered in power systems carry broad applicability across industries.
The chapter’s next major event is a half-day conference on July 31, 2026, hosted as part of Seattle Tech Week‘s Calendar. Seattle Tech Week returns July 27–31 for its fourth year, transforming the Seattle into a sprawling, open-source conference with nearly over 100 events hosted by founders, operators, and community leaders.
Among this year’s additions: InformsCon, a half-day conference organized by the INFORMS Pacific Northwest Chapter on July 31, bringing decision science, operation research and analytics practitioners into Seattle’s premier tech gathering. InformsCon will bridge operations research, data science and analytics with the broader tech ecosystem, a timely convergence as AI reshapes decision-making across industries. Registrations for the event opens on June 26, 2026.