BETHLEHEM, PA (August, 2010): Team “Gladiator”, consisting of ISE PhD students Ruiwei Jiang, Zhili Zhou, and Siqian Shen and advised by Dr. George Lan (Assistant Professor of ISE) were named finalists in the second Optimization Modeling Competition sponsored by AIMMS at this year’s Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications (MOPTA) Conference. The competition required modeling a classic portfolio optimization problem focusing on return and risk that was complicated with the presence of different tax rules. Three finalists were selected from 19 teams from universities throughout the world. The other two finalists were Team “ORTEC” from Gouda and Team “Twente” from the University of Twente, both from the Netherlands. The final round of the competition took place during the conference held at Lehigh University on August 19, 2010. Team ORTEC was named the winner.