SSG Personnel

Doug Bureman:     Doug Bureman is the coordinating partner of The Sports Scheduling Group LLC (SSG).  Prior to forming SSG, he operated a sports business consulting firm that provided services in the areas of strategic planning, business development, marketing and public relations.  One of his clients was Major League Baseball for whom he provided scheduling services.

Before starting his own firm, Doug was Senior Vice President, Business Operations for the Pittsburgh Pirates with responsibility for the team’s Broadcasting, Finance, Public Relations, Marketing, Stadium Operations, Ticketing and Spring Training operations.  During his tenure, the Pirates won two divisional championships and set team records for attendance and revenue.  He was also a member of the National League Schedule Committee.

Prior to joining the Pirates, Doug worked at the University of Cincinnati where he opened a then state-of-the-art on-campus basketball arena/recreation center (The Shoemaker Center); and also provided marketing and operations consulting services for what is now the Western & Southern Financial Group Masters, one of the world’s premier men’s professional tennis events.

Doug began his professional career with the Cincinnati Reds, serving in a number of positions including Public Relations, Traveling Secretary and Business Manager.  During his time with the Reds, the team won five division titles; three National League pennants and two World Series championships.

He holds a Bachelors Degree (Journalism) and Masters Degree (Sports Administration) from Ohio University.

George Nemhauser, Ph.D. (Operations Research):     George Nemhauser is a partner in SSG and the A. Russell Chandler  Professor at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, and was previously on the faculty of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University.

He is one of the world’s foremost experts on discrete optimization (a critical subject in relation to scheduling), and has published more than 100 papers and three books in this field.  His book with Laurence Wolsey, Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, received the Lanchester Prize as the best publication in operations research in 1988.  He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986.

George has worked (and is currently working) with many companies on scheduling applications.  These include almost all of the major U.S. airlines (American, Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways), Lucent Technologies, Schneider Logistics and General Motors.

He has provided basketball schedules for several years for the Atlantic Coast Conference and, in the process, has interacted with their television partners.  He is currently working on a project sponsored by the government of Singapore on scheduling their port operations, the largest in the world.

He is Georgia Tech’s faculty representative to the NCAA and in this capacity routinely interacts with sports administrators and coaches.  He has also just completed terms as President of the ACC and as Chair of the NCAA research committee.  This group analyzes large databases to propose the initial and continuing eligibility rules for NCAA student-athletes.

Michael Trick, Ph.D. (Industrial & Systems Engineering):     Michael Trick is a partner in SSG as well as a researcher and educator in the field of operations research, with a specialization in computational methods in optimization.

He joined the faculty of the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon University in 1989 where he is currently Professor of Operations Research.

He is also a past president of INFORMS, a 14,000 member society of operations research and management science professionals.

Mike has consulted extensively with the United States Postal Service on supply chain design; with Major League Baseball and a number of college basketball conferences on scheduling issues; and with companies such as Motorola and Sony on machine scheduling.

He is also on the editorial board of Constraints, an academic journal that publishes state-of-the-art applications in constraint programming; and an active presenter/participant at many conferences on the intersection of constraint and integer programming.

Kelly Easton, Ph.D. (Industrial & Systems Engineering):     Kelly works as the Senior Analyst  for SSG, and has extensive experience in creating sports schedules.

She received her Ph.D. in 2004 from Georgia Tech in Industrial and Systems Engineering and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic of integer and constraint programming approaches to sports scheduling. Kelly also has Bachelors Degrees from The Johns Hopkins University in Mathematics and Philosophy; and a Masters Degree from Stanford University in Operations Research.

She has also worked for Barclays Global Investors in the development of nonlinear optimization models and GUI for financial research.