754 Millennium - A Marquis Who’s Who Magazine TECHNOLOGY RICHARD “DICK” LARSON, PHD PROFESSOR (RETIRED) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lexington, MA As a professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Richard “Dick” Larson has dedicated his career to operations research in services industries. An alumnus of the school, Dr. Larson received a PhD in operations research in 1969. His interest in the field was sparked by the broad range of professional opportunities it presented. Encouraged by his mentor, Professor Al Drake, he attended MIT for his postgraduate studies and fell in love with the school’s mission and culture. After completing his doctorate, Dr. Larson joined the MIT faculty, launching what would become a 54-year career. In addition to teaching and research, he held numerous institutional leadership roles, including eight years as the director of the Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES). While serving as the director of the CAES from 1995 to 2003, he was responsible for creating a distance learning program in partnership with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, which became known as the Singapore MIT Alliance. In 2019, Dr. Larson retired from MIT, accepting the title of professor post-tenure in recognition of his longterm service to the school. Dr. Larson considers his proudest accomplishment to be his work on the hypercube queueing model, a mathematical computing model designed to analyze vehicle location and deployment requests for urban emergency services departments since its creation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After mastering the then-new C programming language, Dr. Larson developed and refined the model alone, including later optimization work resulting in a novel compression technique that ensured quick processing times in real-world use cases. In addition to his work at MIT, Dr. Larson spent 40 years in industry as the manager of Queues Enforth Development Inc., an independent consulting firm. Initially conceived as a notfor-profit called Public Systems Evaluation, the company underwent several name changes before evolving into Queues Enforth Corporation
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