Robert Fourer is co-founder and President of AMPL Optimization and Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. In collaboration with colleagues at Bell Laboratories, he initiated the design and development of AMPL, a widely used optimization language and system; he has also been a contributor to the NEOS Server and other efforts to make optimization services available over the Internet. He shared the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for NEOS, and the INFORMS Impact Prize in recognition of the influence of algebraic modeling languages for optimization. Bob contributed to the advancement of the simplex algorithm by introducing extensions to allow for the objective to be convex separable piecewise-linear, and he also tackled the resolution of indefinite linear systems found in interior-point methods. In 2004, has was elected fellow of INFORMS.