"Subject to" offers a series of informal conversations with relevant figures in the fields of Operations Research, Combinatorial Optimization and Logistics, and they are hosted by Anand Subramanian, an Associate Professor at Universidade Federal da Paraíb
Héctor Cancela holds a PhD. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rennes 1, INRIA Rennes, France (1996), and a Computer Systems Engineer degree from the Universidad de la República, Uruguay (1990). He is a Full Professor at the Computing Institute at the Engineering School of the Universidad de la República (Uruguay), which he lead in two periods: 2006-2010 and 2017-2023. He was Dean of the Engineering School of the Universidad de la República (2010-2015). He is a Researcher at the National Program for the Development of Basic Sciences (PEDECIBA), Uruguay. His research interests are centered in network models and stochastic models, applied jointly with optimization methods for solving problems in different areas (reliability, communications, transport, production, biological applications, agricultural applications, etc). He has published more than 100 full papers in international journals, indexed conference proceedings and book chapters. He has supervised more than 20 Ph.D. and M.Sc. thesis. He has been General Chair and Program Chair of several international events, and a member of the Program Committee of more than 50 international conferences. He participated in the development of accreditation standards for MERCOSUR engineering programs. He was member of the task force which prepared the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2020 report (ACM/IEEE CC 2020). He is associate editor of the journals International Transactions in Operations Research (ITOR), RAIRO Operations Research (RAIRO-OR), Mathematical Methods of Operations Research (MMOR), Computational and Applied Mathematics (COAM), and member of the editorial board of the journals Pesquisa Operacional (Brazil) and Ingenieria de Sistemas (Chile). Between 2010 and 2019 he was editor-in-chief of CLEIej, the electronic journal of the CLEI association. He is an IEEE Senior Member, also a member of ACM. He is a former President of CLEI (Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática – 2016-2020), and a former president of ALIO (Asociación Latino Ibero Americana de Investigación Operativa – 2006-2010. He is currently president of IFORS (International Federation of Operational Research Societies, 2025-2027).
Bissan Ghaddar is the John M. Thompson Chair in Engineering Leadership and Innovation and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Sustainability at the Ivey Business School working on problems at the intersection of machine learning and non-linear optimization. She is also affiliated with university of Waterloo and DTU. Bissan holds a PhD in Management Science from the University of Waterloo. Before joining academia, she worked on energy, water, and transportation network optimization at IBM Research and on inventory management problems at the Centre for Operational Research and Analysis, Department of National Defence Canada. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as Mathematical Programming, INFORMS Journal on Computing, SIAM Journal on Optimization, among others. Her research has been supported by national and international grants including NSERC, OCE, Cisco, H2020, and Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship. She serves as the Research Lead at the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre and is a fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, engaged in the research cluster on AI, Global Governance, and International Public Policy. She is the Associate Editor for the EURO Journal on Computational Optimization. She was recently awarded the best survey paper award at the EURO conference in Copenhagen and the Distinguished International Associate by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Dominique de Werra is an emeritus professor of Operations Research at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) in Switzerland. His research fields include Combinatorial Optimization, Graph Theory, Scheduling and Timetabling. After spending a few years as an assistant professor in Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo (Canada) he joined the Math Department of EPFL. He conducted a collection of Operational Research projects (applied as well as theoretical) with a number of industrial partners. He is an associate editor of Discrete Applied Mathematics, Discrete Mathematics, Annals of Operations Research and a member of a dozen of editorial boards of international journals. From 1990 to 2000 Dominique de Werra was the Vice-President of EPFL; he was in charge of the international relations and represented his institution in many academy networks in Europe (like the CLUSTER network of excellence which he chaired). He was also in charge of all education programs of EPFL. He was President of IFORS (the International Federation of Operational Research Societies) from 2010 to 2012. In 1987-1988 he was President of EURO, the European Association of Operational Research Societies. In 1985–1986 he was President of ASRO, the Swiss Operations Research Society. In 1995 he was the laureate of the EURO Gold Medal. He has obtained Honorary Degrees from the University of Paris, the Technical University of Poznan (Poland) and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). In 2012 he was awarded the EURO Distinguished Service Medal. He published over 200 papers in international scientific journals. He also wrote and edited several books. He was member of many committees in various countries of Europe and America (evaluation of institutions, accreditation, strategic orientation, etc.).
Harilaos N. Psaraftis is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Technology, Management and Economics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). His areas of interest are maritime logistics, intermodal logistics, port logistics, and green logistics. He has a PhD from MIT, where he was a faculty member from 1979 to 1989, receiving tenure in 1985. He was a Professor at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) from 1989 to 2013 and at DTU from 2013 to 2023. He also served as CEO of the port of Piraeus from 1996 to 2002. He has published extensively and has received several academic and industry awards. His latest book is entitled “Sustainable Shipping: A Cross-Disciplinary View”, Springer (2019).
Hugo Sconlik is regarded as one of the pioneers of Informatics in Argentina. In 1985 he created the Computer Science Department, of which he is currently Full Professor, at the School of Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Cryptography is Hugo's focal area of research, gaining him recognition as a leading figure in this field. He is the co-author of the Argentine Electronic Signature Law enacted in 2001. That said, his research interests are not limited to cryptography and comprise other areas such as numerical analysis, mathematical models and even robotics. Hugo has published about 50 scientific papers and two books. He was awarded the 2003 Konex Platinum prize for the best trajectory in Science and Technology in Argentina of the decade 1993-2003 and in 2005 the Sadosky prize for the best trajectory in Informatics. He was twice elected Vice President at Large of IFORS (International Federation for Operations Research Societies). Hugo has also been quite active besides academia, both in the private (corporate) sector and as consultant to multiple public and international organizations, and frequently appears in the media. He was a Founding Partner of two leading firms that develop products and solutions for SET and identity protection. Hugo holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Zurich and a PhD (Honoris Causa) from the University of Cuyo in Argentina.
Karen Aardal is a Full Professor at TU Delft, in the Netherlands, specializing in integer and combinatorial optimization, with a focus on algebraic methods for solving integer optimization problems. Her research also includes algorithm analysis and practical applications in health and logistics. Karen has been actively involved in professional societies, serving as Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and as a member of its Publications and Executive Committees. She has also been a board member of the INFORMS Computing Society for three terms. Her editorial contributions include roles as Area Editor for “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” at the INFORMS Journal on Computing and as Associate Editor for journals such as Mathematical Programming Series B, Networks, Operations Research Letters, and the EURO Journal on Computational Optimization. In addition, she co-edited the Handbook on Discrete Optimization, as well as volumes of Mathematical Programming Series B, and she chaired the Program Committee of IPCO 2023. Karen's service extends to national and international scientific organizations. She was a member of the Dutch Mathematics Council (2016–2021) and currently serves on the advisory committee of CWI Amsterdam, and the board of ENW at the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Recognized for her significant contributions to the field, Karen was named an INFORMS Fellow in 2019.
Artur Pessoa is an Associate Professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from PUC-Rio and master's and doctoral degrees in Informatics from the same institution. His research interests focus on developing insightful approaches to solving optimization problems in general. Artur has contributed to designing solution methods based on integer programming, column generation, dynamic programming, branch-and-bound, and related techniques to tackle combinatorial, bilevel, robust, and other optimization problems. He is one of the key figures behind several state-of-the-art exact algorithms for vehicle routing, scheduling, and generalized quadratic assignment problems. He has published papers in prestigious journals like Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, Theoretical Computer Science, SIAM Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming Computation, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Transportation Science, European Journal of Operational Research, among others. Artur was honored with the best doctoral dissertation award from the Brazilian Computer Society and has twice won the best paper award at the Brazilian OR Symposium. In addition, he received the 2017 Best Paper Prize from the journal Mathematical Programming Computation, and the 2022 Transportation Science Meritorious Service Award from INFORMS. Artur is one of the developers of the VRPSolver package and the Coluna branch-cut-and-price framework. He is also a co-author of the recent book “Optimizing with Column Generation”, written in collaboration with Eduardo Uchoa and Lorenza Moreno.
Alexander Rinnooy Kan (1949) grew up in The Hague. He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Leiden in 1972. In the same year, he acquired a Candidate's degree in Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam. From 1973 to 1977 he taught mathematics and statistics at Delft University of Technology. During that period, in 1976, he obtained his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. Between 1977 and 1991 Rinnooy Kan held senior academic positions at Erasmus University Rotterdam and other European and American universities. He was rector magnificus of Erasmus University from 1986 to 1989, has published widely in professional journals and holds a number of honorary degrees. As Chairman of the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers (VNO-NCW), a post he held from 1991 to 1996, Rinnooy Kan was one of the main representatives of Dutch business. He was member of the ING Group Executive Board from 1996 to 2006. Rinnooy Kan has been Chairman of the Netherlands Social and Economic Council from 2006 to 2012. In 2012, he was appointed as Distinguished University Professor at the University of Amsterdam. In June 2015, he was elected to the Dutch Senate. He sits on a variety of boards and has advised the Dutch government on numerous occasions.
José Mario Martínez was born in Cangas del Narcea, Asturias, Spain in 1948, but he moved to Argentina in 1951. He received the B. S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires in 1971 and the Ph. D. degree in Systems Engineering and Computation from the University of Rio de Janeiro in 1978. Since 1978 he is a Professor at the Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Campinas, Brazil. Since 2020 he has been Emeritus Professor with the University of Campinas. He is the author of two books, around 200 papers and several software packages for Optimization. His research interests include Applied Mathematics, Optimization and Numerical Analysis. Currently, he is part of the Editorial Board of the journals Numerical Algorithms, Optimization Methods and Software and European Journal on Operations Research. Mario was a recipient of the Order of Scientific Merit of the Brazilian Ministry of Science. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and SIAM Fellow. In 2023, he received the Su Buchin Prize from the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Martínez was a recipient of the Order of Scientific Merit of the Brazilian Ministry of Science. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and SIAM Fellow. In 2023 he received the Su Buchin Prize from the Institute of Computational and Industrial Mathematics, ICIAM.
Simge Küçükyavuz is Chair and David A. and Karen Richards Sachs Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University. She is an expert in mixed-integer, large-scale, and stochastic optimization, with applications in complex computational problems across numerous domains, including social networks, computing and energy infrastructure, statistical learning, and logistics. Her research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). She is an INFORMS Fellow, and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Prize. She is the past chair of ICS and serves on the editorial boards of Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, SIAM Journal on Optimization, and MOS-SIAM Optimization Book Series. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley.
Timo Berthold is a Director at FICO, leading the MIP research and development team of the FICO Xpress Solver. In additon, he is a lecturer at the Mathematical Optimization Department of TU Berlin, working of the intersection of academia and industry. Before joining FICO, Timo was a main developer of the open-source MIP and MINLP solver SCIP at Zuse Institue Berlin. Timo is an expert on all aspects of computational mixed-integer linear and nonlinear optimization, heuristic methods, and recently, the integration of ML methods into optimization solvers. He has published over 50 papers in this field, supervised many talented students and won multiple prestigious awards for his research. As a fun-fact, his PhD thesis won the 2014 GOR dissertation award and made the finals of the EURO dissertation award, while at the same time, an accompanying article on his PhD work received a science-communication prize for being the best "Math research explained to the general public" article of the year.
Marielle Christiansen is a professor of Operations Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is head of the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management with more than 230 employees. Her primary research interests concern development and implementation of optimization models and methods for industry related planning problems as regards transportation, logistics, and production. She is particularly interested in applications where maritime transportation and supply chain challenges are considered and has been involved in a number of shipping industry – sponsored projects. Her research within maritime transportation has resulted in numerous papers in journals like Computers and Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Naval Research and Logistics, OMEGA, Networks, Transportation Research part C as well as Transportation Science. Furthermore, she has contributed with several surveys within maritime transport optimization in general and within combined inventory management and routing and fleet composition and routing in particular. She has been involved in the organization of several international conferences such as TRISTAN VII (Triennial symposium on transportation analysis), Tromsø, Norway, 2010, EURO-XXV, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2012 (Programme Committee Chair), and VeRoLog (Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization), Oslo, Norway (2014).
Dr. Pedro Munari is an Associate Professor at the Production Engineering Department of the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo, Brazil. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Computational Mathematics from the University of São Paulo. His Ph.D. Dissertation received the prestigious Doctoral Prize for the Best Dissertation from the Brazilian Society of Applied and Computational Mathematics. Dr. Munari has also held visiting scholar positions at the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK), at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA), and at the Friedrich-Schiller Universitat Jena (Germany). He has led numerous successful research projects with grants from funding agencies and has developed applied projects with several companies in Brazil, with a specific focus on Operations Research and Logistics. His research interests include exact and heuristic methods, with emphasis on the column generation technique, branch-price-and-cut methods, and decomposition techniques for large-scale problems. Additionally, he has made contributions to the field by introducing formulations and solution methods for challenging deterministic, stochastic and robust combinatorial optimization problems, such as vehicle routing, lot sizing, and cutting/packing problems. He has published over fourty papers in prestigious journals, such as Transportation Science, EJOR, MPC, among several others. He is also on the editorial board of three journals, including MPC. He has a succesfull Youtube channel, called Munariflix, where he broadcasts videos with foundations of OR.
Michael "Mike" Florian is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and OR at the University of Montreal. He has more than 60 years of practical and academic experience working with OR problems related to the transportation of people and goods. Mike has published over 150 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings on transportation research and OR. He was an associate editor of several journals, including Operations Research, Transportation Science, INFOR, Transportation Research Part B, to name a few. He was the founder of a company called INRO, whose transportation planning software packages are used in many countries worldwide. In 1990, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2006, he was named a fellow of INFORMS. Mike is a recipient of numerous awards, such as the Merit Award of the Canadian OR Society and the Robert D. Herman Lifetime Achievement Award. Mike was also recognized as a “Pioneer of Computing in Canada” by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, and he was named “Honorary Professor” by Shanghai University of Science and Technology.
Alain Zemkoho is an associate professor in operational research at the School of Mathematical Sciences within the University of Southampton where he is affiliated to the OR Group and CORMSIS. Prior to joining Southampton, he was a research fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK) and had previously worked as a research associate at the Technical University of Freiberg (Germany). He is an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Fellow for 2024-2026, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics & Its Applications, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and had been a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for 2019-2023. Alain's research interests revolve around continuous optimization with specific focus on bilevel optimization, stability analysis for parametric optimization, and machine learning modelling, theory, and numerical methods. He has published 40 papers around these topics and has secured grants totalling close to £2M in full economic cost (as PI or Co-I) to fund some of his research. Alain also serves as a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and of the OR Society Research Committee.
Brian Denton is the Stephen M. Pollock Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests are data-driven decision-making and optimization under uncertainty with applications to healthcare delivery, semiconductor supply chain management, and other industrial systems. He has a cross-appointment in the School of Medicine. He is a member of the Cancer Center and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) at the University of Michigan. He served as department chair from 2018-2023. Before joining the University of Michigan, he worked at IBM, Mayo Clinic, and North Carolina State University. His honors and awards include the National Science Foundation Career Award, the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize, the Institute of Industrial Engineers Outstanding Publication Award, and the Canadian Operations Research Society Best Paper Award. He has served on the Editorial Boards of Health Systems, IISE Transactions, Interfaces, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Medical Decision Making, Operations Research, Optimization in Engineering, and Production and Operations Management. He served as the founding Medical Decision Making Department Editor for IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering from 2008-2015. He has co-authored over 100 journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and patents. He is an elected Fellow of INFORMS and IISE, past Chair of the INFORMS Health Applications Section, Secretary of INFORMS, and President of INFORMS. He currently serves as Chair-Elect of the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads.
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.
Candace ("Candi") Yano is a Distinguished Professor with a joint appointment between the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) and the Operations and Information Technology Management group at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. She currently holds the Gary and Sherron Kalbach Chair in Business Administration and the Morris Chang Distinguished Professorship in the Management of Technology Innovation at UC Berkeley. She has served as department chair in the IEOR Department and as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Haas. In addition to her faculty positions, she currently serves as the Faculty Director for the concurrent MBA-Master of Engineering program. She holds an A.B. in Economics, a M.S. in Operations Research, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. Professor Yano's primary research interests are production, inventory and logistics management, particularly on how to deal with various sources of uncertainty in these contexts, as well as interdisciplinary problems involving operations and marketing. She has authored or co-authored over 80 articles and book chapters on these subjects and is the recipient of a variety of National Science Foundation and industry grants. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief of IIE Transactions and Department Editor for Management Science, as well as in various editorial capacities for Operations Research, Interfaces (now INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics), Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Service Science and Naval Research Logistics, among others. Professor Yano is a co-founder of the Women in Operations Research and Management Science (WORMS) Forum within the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and was awarded this organization's Award for the Advancement of Women in 2008. She has also received the Kimball Medal, the highest award for service given by INFORMS, in 2018 and the INFORMS President's Award in 2022. Professor Yano is a Fellow of both INFORMS and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (formerly Institute of Industrial Engineers).
Jan Karel Lenstra is CWI Fellow and former general director of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, in particular scheduling, routing, complexity, and approximation. He was co-editor of fifteen books, including "The Traveling Salesman Problem", "History of Mathematical Programming", and "Local Search in Combinatorial Optimization". He has been chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society and of the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society. He has also been chair of Committees on Mathematics in Primary Education and on Informatics in Secondary Education of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences, and of the Spinoza and Stevin Prize Committees of the Dutch Science Council. He served as editor-in-chief of Mathematics of OR and of OR Letters. Jan Karel became an INFORMS fellow in 2004 and he was awarded the EURO Gold Medal in 2011. In that same year, he was made a knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
Dr. Ted Ralphs received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1995. He is a professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Lehigh University and is co-founder and director of Lehigh's Laboratory for Computational Optimization Research at Lehigh (COR@L). He is also co-founder and board member of the COIN-OR Foundation, a non-profit foundation promoting the development of open source software for operations research, as well as the project manager for a variety of projects hosted in the COIN-OR open source software repository. He is the area editor for Software Tools at the INFORMS Journal on Computing and the area editor for Data, Software, and Computation at Operations Research. He is a Fellow of INFORMS. His research interests include theoretical aspects of discrete optimization, such as duality and complexity theory; development of a variety of methodologies for solving a range of discrete optimization problems, such as those with multiple levels/stages or multiple objectives; development of parallel search algorithms; development of open source software; and applications of discrete optimization.
Martin Grötschel, born in 1948, studied mathematics at U Bochum (1969-1973), received his PhD in economics (1977) and his habilitation in Operations Research (1981) at U Bonn. He was professor of applied mathematics at U Augsburg 1982-1991, professor of information technology at TU Berlin and vice president/president of the Zuse Institute for Information Technology Berlin (ZIB) 1991-2015. Grötschel was the President of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) 1993-1994, Secretary General of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) 2007-2014, President of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) 2015-2020 and chaired the DFG Research Center MATHEON “Mathematics for Key Technologies” 2002-2008. He has held numerous further science administration and advisory positions. Grötschel's main areas of research are discrete mathematics, optimization, and operations research. He has made, e.g., contributions to polyhedral combinatorics and to the development of methods proving the polynomial time solvability of optimization problems. He has also focused on the design of practically efficient algorithms for hard combinatorial optimization problems appearing in practice, such as the travelling salesman, the max-cut, the linear ordering, and various connectivity problems. Cutting plane algorithms for integer programming are among his favorites. The application areas include telecommunications, chip design, energy, production planning and control, logistics, and public transport. He has been an open access and open science activist and is currently involved in fostering digital humanities. Grötschel's scientific achievements were honored with several distinctions including the Cantor Medal, the Leibniz, the Beckurts, the Dantzig, the Fulkerson, and the John von Neumann Theory Prize. He holds four honorary degrees and is a member of seven scientific academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering. For more details, see http://www.zib.de groetschel/ Martin Grötschel and his wife Iris enjoy travelling, understanding and appreciating varied cultures, and exploring their history and archaeology.
Carola Doerr, formerly Winzen, is a CNRS research director in the Computer Science department LIP6 of Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. Carola's main research activities are in the analysis of black-box optimization algorithms, both by mathematical and by empirical means. Specifically, she is very interested in controlling the choice and the configuration of black-box optimization algorithms all along the optimization process -- with and without Machine Learning techniques. She is equally interested in complexity results, running time bounds, good benchmarking practices, empirical evaluations, and practical applications of self-adjusting black-box optimization algorithms. Carola is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO) and Evolutionary Computation. She is/was program chair for the BBSR track at GECCO 2024, the GECH track at GECCO 2023, for PPSN 2020, FOGA 2019 and for the theory tracks of GECCO 2015 and 2017. She has organized Dagstuhl seminars and Lorentz Center workshops. Together with Pascal Kerschke, Carola leads the 'Algorithm selection and configuration' working group of COST action CA22137. Carola's works have received several awards, among them the CNRS bronze medal, the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, best paper awards at GECCO, CEC, and EvoApplications.
Emilio Carrizosa is Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research in the University of Seville, Spain. His research interests include: Industrial and Applied Mathematics; Data Science (Explainable and Fair Machine Learning, Supervised Classification and Regression), Mathematical Optimization and Operations Research (Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming, Global Optimization, Vector Optimization). He is President of math-in, the Spanish Network of Industrial Mathematics (2021-), President of PET MSO-ED, the Spanish Platform for Technologies of Modelling, Simulation and Optimization in a Digital Environment (2023-), and has served as Director of IMUS, the Mathematical Institute of the University of Seville, President of SEIO, the Spanish Statistics and OR Society, and Editor-in-Chief of TOP, the Spanish OR journal. He has (Scopus: 18.10.23) 147 publications with 1,848 citations (819 in the period 2019-2023), yielding an h-index: 25. He has papers in top journals in the area Operations Research and Management Science: Operations Research (2), Mathematical Programming (6), Management Science (1), Mathematics of Operations Research (4), Omega (4), European Journal of Operational Research (25), Computers & OR (21). Due to his interdisciplinary research, he has also published indisciplines beyond OR: Statistics and Probability (Biostatistics, ADAC, CSDA, J Multivariate Analysis, J of Applied Probability), Energy (Applied Energy, Solar Energy, International Journal of Energy Research), Chemical Engineering (Computers & Chemical Engineering, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research), Hydrology (J of Hydrology). The Spanish Research Agency has acknowledged 5 research periods (5 sexenios de investigación): 1990-95, 1996-01, 2002-07, 2008-13, 2014-19. He has supervised 14 PhD Theses (plus 4 ongoing in the University of Seville), three of them have been awarded various national and international prizes: Vanesa Guerrero (Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado Universidad de Sevilla, Research Award Vicent Caselles RSME-FBBVA, Research Award Ramiro Melendreras SEIO 2018), M. Asunción Jiménez-Cordero (Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado Universidad de Sevilla), Cristina Molero-Rı́o (Classification Society Distinguished Dissertation Award 2022). For his research activity, he has received awards such as the Excellence FAMA Award 2020 (branch: Sciences) in the University of Seville, the Award Academia Sevillana de Ciencias for young researchers (1998) and the Doc2toral Award in the PhD in Mathematics in the University of Seville (1993). He is involved in Transfer of Knowledge activities. He has been leading researcher in industrial projects and contracts in applications of OR to different sectors: Energy (Repsol, Abengoa, TSK Flagsol), Health (UDX), Logistics (Azur Global Business SL), Information Technologies (Junta de Andalucı́a), and also participating in contracts on Environment (Junta de Andalucı́a), Smart cities (IMESAPI), Logistics (Portel). Since 2022 he is Scientific Advisor of the OR-IA company OGA. The Spanish Research Agency has acknowledged 1 transfer of knowledge period (1 sexenio de transferencia): -2013. He has an intense activity of outreach, participating in debates and interviews in tv, radio and newspapers on industrial mathematics and teaching mathematics.
Shadi Sharif Azadeh is an associate professor at Civil Engineering and Geosciences faculty and the co-director of SUM Lab (Sustainable Urban Multi-modal Mobility) at TU Delft. Previously, she worked as an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the group of Operations Research and Logistics. She holds a PhD in Mathematics (operations research) from Polytechnique Montreal where she received doctorate excellency award at University of Montreal (CIRRELT) as well as Michael Florian Award for best PhD thesis research award in Canada. Her areas of expertise include integration of operations research with behavioural models for transport, mobility and logistics networks (Choice Driven Optimization). More precisely, her current major projects are related to: (i) developing methods to tackle uncertainty with a special focus on forecasting and scenario generation for passenger mobility and parcel delivery services; (ii) combining pricing and assortment optimisation methods to model supply and demand interplay for last mile trip/delivery; (iii) developing real-time methods to incorporate in combinatorial optimisation framework for large-scale transport problems; (iv) special focus on designing sustainable multi-modal transport systems; and (v) introducing solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change on transport networks. She is an Associate Editor at Transportation Science, an editorial board editor at Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, editorial board member of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. She serves as an Associate Editor of Nature Series (npj) Sustainable Mobility and Transport journal. She has served as guest editor of three special issues at Transportation Science (2021-2023), EURO Journal of Transport and Logistics (2021-2023) and OR Spectrum (2023-).
Thomas Stützle is a research director of the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS (National Science Foundation) working at the IRIDIA laboratory of Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He received the Diplom (German equivalent of MSc. degree) in business engineering from the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany in 1994, and his PhD and habilitation in computer science both from the Computer Science Department of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He has co-authored three books among which are “Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications” (Morgan Kaufmann) and “Ant Colony Optimization” (MIT Press), both being the main references in their respective areas. His other publications include more than 250 articles in journals, international conferences or edited books many of which are highly cited. In fact, his research contributions received so far more than 60,000 citations in Google Scholar and his h-index is 84. His main research interests are in stochastic local search algorithm, swarm intelligence, multi-objective optimization, and automatic design of algorithms. He is probably best known (i) for his contributions to early advancements in ant colony optimization including algorithms such as Max-Min Ant System, (ii) the establishment of algorithmic frameworks for iterated local search and iterated greedy, and (iii) as a driving force in the advancement of automatic algorithm configuration techniques and their usage in the automatic design of high-performing algorithms. He received seven best paper awards from conferences and his 2002 GECCO paper on “A Racing Algorithm for Configuring Metaheuristics” received the 2012 SIGEVO impact award. He is an Associate Editor of Applied Mathematics and Computation, Computational Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, International Transactions in Operational Research, and Swarm Intelligence and on the editorial board of seven other journals. He is also frequently involved in international conferences and workshops with program or organizational responsibilities. In 2018, Thomas suffered a stroke that affected, among other things, his ability to remember words, but he has improved a lot and he is now working full time again.
Ignacio E. Grossmann is the R. R. Dean University Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and former department head at Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his B.S. degree at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph.D. at Imperial College in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He is a member and former director of the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making, an industrial consortium that involves about 20 petroleum, chemical, engineering, and software companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of AIChE and INFORMS. He has received the INFORMS Computing Society Prize and the following AIChE awards: Computing in Chemical Engineering, William H. Walker for Excellence in Publications, Warren Lewis for Excellence in Education, Research Excellence in Sustainable Engineering, and Founders Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Chemical Engineering. In 2015, he was the first recipient of the Sargent Medal by the IChemE. He has honorary doctorates from Abo Akademi in Finland, University of Maribor in Slovenia, Technical University of Dortmund in Germany, University of Cantabria in Spain, Russian Kazan National Research Technological University, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina, Universidad de Alicante in Spain and RWTH Aachen, Germany. He is a 2019 top cited scientist in Computer Science and Electronics: 53 Worldwide, 38 National. He has authored more than 700 papers, the recent textbook Advanced Optimization for Process Systems Engineering, and the textbook Systematic Methods of Chemical Process Design, which he co-authored with Larry Biegler and Art Westerberg. He has also organized the virtual library on process systems engineering. Grossmann has graduated 68 Ph.D. and 34 M.S. students. His main research interests are in the areas of discrete continuous optimization, optimal synthesis and planning of chemical processes and energy systems, and supply chain optmization.
Dr. Robert Bixby has a BS in IEOR from U.C. Berkeley (1968), and a PhD in OR from Cornell (1972). He has held academic positions at the University of Kentucky, Northwestern University, and Rice University. He is currently Noah Harding Professor Emeritus at Rice University and visiting Professor of Mathematics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization in 1987, and co-founded Gurobi Optimization in 2008, serving as CEO from 2008-2015. Dr. Bixby has published over fifty journal articles and is an acknowledged expert on the computational aspects of linear and integer programming. He has won the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society, and the INFORMS Impact and Frederick W. Lanchester Prizes. He was Editor-in-Chief Mathematical Programming, Series A, 1989-1994, and Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society, 2001-2004. In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Changhyun Kwon is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST. His research aims to advance computational optimization methods for efficient transportation and logistics systems. His current focus is to improve the efficiency of heuristic and exact algorithms using machine-learning approaches to solve large-scale vehicle routing problems and mobility service operations problems. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from Penn State and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from KAIST in 2000. His research has been published in Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, INFORMS Journal on Computing, etc. Before joining KAIST, he was a faculty member at the University at Buffalo and the University of South Florida. Currently, he is on the Editorial Boards of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, and the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of TRB. He was the Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG of the INFORMS TSL Society and is the current International Liaison for Asia/Oceania. He wrote the book "Julia Programming for Operations Research," and he is a member of the JuMP steering committee, an open-source community for developing mathematical optimization tools in Julia. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song is the R. David Thomas Professor of Business Administration and a Professor of Operations Management at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. Professor Song holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She studies supply chain management and operations strategy, topics including supply chain inventory optimization and resilience strategies, Assemble-to Order systems and supply chain flexibility, dynamic pricing and inventory control, data-driven operational decision-making, supply chain digitization, e-commerce strategies and network design, and socially responsible operations. She has published numerous articles in leading academic journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. She has edited and co-edited two books, “Research Handbook on Inventory Management” and “Supply Chain Structures: Coordination, Information and Optimization.” She has also co-authored the book “The Art of Matching: Joy of Living and Operations Innovations” (in Chinese). Professor Song is an INFORMS Fellow, a Distinguished Fellow and former President of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society, and a Department Editor for Management Science and Service Science. She is also a former Area Editor for Operations Research and IIE Transactions. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Overseas Young Scholar Award(海外 出青年)by the Natural Science Foundation of China and was named a Chang Jiang Chaired Professor by the Ministry of Education in China (教育部长江学者讲座教授).
Karla Hoffman is a Professor in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department at George Mason University (GMU) where she served as Chair for five years. She received her D.Sc. from George Washington University in operations research. Prior to her position at GMU, she worked as a mathematician in the Center for Applied Mathematics of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where, in 1984, she was awarded the Applied Research Award. Her other awards include George Mason University's Distinguished Faculty Award, the INFORMS Fellows Award, the INFORMS George E. Kimball Medal and the INFORMS Edelman Prize. Recently, she was inducted as a Fellow of IFORS (The International Federation of OR Societies). She served as President of INFORMS in 1999 and has also served on the Executive Committees of ORSA, IFORS, and the Mathematical Programming Society. She has served on multiple editorial boards. Dr. Hoffman's primary areas of research are optimization and auction design and testing. Her research focuses on the development of new algorithms for solving complex problems arising in industry and government. She serves as a consultant to the FCC on spectrum auctions and has previously consulted to a variety of government agencies including Dept. of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Dept. of Transportation, and the Commerce Department. Her industrial consulting has been in dynamic and real-time routing and scheduling, and in capital budgeting.
Paolo Toth is "Professor Emeritus" of “Operations Research” at DEI: (Department of Electrical and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi”, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, A.D. 1088), where he was Full Professor from 1983 to 2011. His research interests include Operations Research and Mathematical Programming methodologies and, in particular, the design and implementation of effective exact and heuristic algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Theory problems, and their application to real-world Transportation, Logistics, Loading, Routing, Crew Management, Railway Optimization problems. He is author of more than 190 papers published in international journals and of the book "Knapsack Problems: Algorithms and Computer Implementations" (coauthor S. Martello; J. Wiley, 1990). He is also Co-editor of the books "The Vehicle Routing Problem" (SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications, 2002) and "Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods and Applications” (MOS-SIAM Series on Optimization, 2014). He was President of EURO (Association of the European Operational Research Societies) for the period 1995-1996, and President of IFORS (International Federation of the Operational Research Societies) for the period 2001-2003. He acted as Chair of the Program Committee for the Triennial IFORS Conference in 1999. He received several international awards, among which: the "EURO Gold Medal" (the highest distinction within Operations Research in Europe) in 1998; the "Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science" (from INFORMS) in 2005; the "INFORMS Fellowship" in 2016; the “EURO Distinguished Service Award” in 2019; the "IFORS Fellowship" in 2020. In May 2003, the University of Montreal conferred him a "Doctorate honoris causa" in Operational Research. In October 2012, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting), he delivered the “IFORS Distinguished Plenary Lecture”; in July 2023, at the IFORS Triennial Conference, he delivered the “EURO Plenary Address”. He supervised more than 200 master theses, 25 PhD students from 6 different countries, and 16 Post-Docs.
Jayme Szwarcfiter is a Professor Emeritus at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Visiting Professor at Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in Brazil. His research interests are related to Graph Theory, Algorithms, Theory of Computation, and Discrete Mathematics. He has published more than 170 journal papers and several influential textbooks in these areas, and has supervised dozens of masters and doctoral students. Jayme is a Full Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and he has received numerous national and international awards such as the Grand Cross for Scientific Merit, the Almirante Álvaro Alberto prize, the Scientific Merit Prize awarded by the Brazilian Computer Society, and the Luis Federico Leloir prize, awarded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of Argentina. In addition, Jayme was a visiting professor in many countries like the US, England, Scotland, Argentina, Germany, France, Poland, Israel, Czech Republic, and Japan.
Margarida Carvalho has a bachelor and masters in mathematics. In 2016, she completed the PhD in computer science at the University of Porto (Portugal) for which she received the 2018 EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2017, she came to Montreal as an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at Polytechnique and never left since then. One year after, 2018, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, where now she holds the FRQ-IVADO Research Chair in Data Science for Combinatorial Game Theory. Margarida is an expert in mixed-integer programming, algorithmic game theory and computational complexity. She has papers in prestigious OR journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, and Mathematical Programming, as well as publications on the intersection of optimization, economics and machine learning in top conferences like EC, NeurIPS, and AAAI. Margarida is associate editor in INFORMS Journal on Computing, OR Spectrum and Dynamic Games and Applications.
Bruce Golden received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland Business School in 1976 and served as a Department Chairman from 1980 to 1996. Currently, he is the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research interests include heuristic search, combinatorial optimization, networks, and applied operations research. Bruce has received numerous awards, including the Thomas L. Saaty Prize (1994 and 2005), the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award (2000), the INFORMS Award for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice (2003), and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize (2005). He was named an INFORMS Fellow in 2004. Since 1999, Bruce has served as Editor-in-Chief of NETWORKS. Before that, he was Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. In addition, he has received numerous contracts and grants, has consulted for a wide variety of organizations, and has served on the Board of Directors of several high-tech companies based in Maryland. In 1980, he founded a management consulting company with several colleagues. The focus was on business logistics. Clients included IBM, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, Federal Express, Toyota, DuPont, and many others. In the late 1980's, Bruce co-founded a second company, specializing in the design and sales of vehicle routing software. He and his partners successfully grew these companies and sold them in late 1998. The surviving company is RouteSmart Technologies, Inc. and it continues to thrive. Recent clients include the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx Ground, Australia Post, Swiss Post and many others. Bruce Golden was selected as the second VeRoLog Fellow (and first non-European) in July 2017. The VeRoLog Fellow title is awarded by the board of the European Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization to an individual who throughout his or her professional career has made fundamental and sustained contributions to vehicle routing and logistics optimization, and has influenced the field through his or her writings, teaching, service, and nurturing of younger professionals. In addition, in 2018 he was nominated and selected as a recipient of the George E. Kimball Medal for distinguished service to INFORMS and to the profession of operations research and management sciences. In 2019, Professor Golden received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science & Logistics.
Dr. Achterberg studied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Berlin and the Zuse Institute Berlin. He finished his PhD in mathematics under supervision of Prof. Martin Grötschel in 2007. Dr. Achterberg is the author of SCIP, currently the best academic MIP solver. In addition to numerous publications in scientific journals he has also received several awards for his dissertation and for SCIP, such as the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize. From 2006, Dr. Achterberg worked for ILOG / IBM as developer of CPLEX in versions 11 to 12.6. Since 2014 he participates in the development of the Gurobi Optimizer, currently being the Vice President of R&D at Gurobi. In his spare time, Dr. Achterberg continues to work on the Gurobi MIP solver, because he is addicted to MIP. He does not have any interest in other things; his spouse, his three children, his two drum kits, and his attendances in the moshpits of punk rock concerts are just mock-ups to pretend having a normal life.
Francesca Maggioni is Associate Professor of Operations Research at the Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering (DIGIP) of the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests concern both methodological and applicative aspects of optimization under uncertainty. From a methodological point of view, she has developed different types of bounds and approximations for stochastic, robust and distributionally robust multistage optimization problems. She applies these methods to solve problems in logistics, transportation, energy production, pension funds and machine learning. On these topics she has published more than 60 scientific articles featured in peer-reviewed operations research and optimization journal like, among others, SIAM Journal on Optimization (SIOPT), European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Transportation Science, Journal of Optimization, Theory and Applications (JOTA). She is currently serving the “EURO Working Group on Stochastic Optimization” and the “AIRO Thematic Section of Stochastic Programming” as chair and has served the “Stochastic Programming Society” in the period 2016-2023. She is Associate Editor of the journals “Computational Management Science” (CMS), “EURO Journal on Computational Optimization” (EJCO), “An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research” (TOP), “Networks” and “International Transactions in Operational Research” (ITOR). She is principal investigator of the PRIN 2020 project "Urban Logistics and sustainable TRAnsportation: OPtimization under uncertainTY and MAchine Learning (ULTRAOPTYMAL) funded by the Italian University and Research Ministry.
Haroldo Gambini Santos is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon.com. For 10+ years he was a Professor at the Computer Science department of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. In 2018-2019 he was a Senior Researcher at the CS department of KU Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on algorithms and models for combinatorial optimization problems. In 2019 he won the COIN-OR Cup award for his contributions to the CBC mixed-integer linear optimization software. In 2012 his team won the Second International Timetabling Competition. From 2012 to 2020, he was a member of the COIN-OR Foundation Technical Leadership Council. He authored several papers on prestigious operations research journals such as Computers & Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Scheduling among others. Haroldo is the co-creator of Python-MIP.
Gilbert Laporte is Professor Emeritus at HEC Montréal. He obtained his Ph.D. in Operational Research at the London School of Economics in 1975. He was Professor of Operational Research at HEC Montréal and Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management until August 2020. He is now Professor at the School of Management of the University of Bath, United Kingdom, and Professor II at Molde University College, Norway. He is also Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool, and Distinguished Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and founding member of the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD). He has been Editor of Transportation Science, Computers & Operations Research and INFOR. He has authored or coauthored more than 20 books and 600 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of vehicle routing, location, districting and timetabling. Gilbert Laporte has received many scientific awards including the Pergamon Prize (UK) in 1987, the 1994 Award of Merit from the Canadian OR Society (CORS), and the CORS Practice Prize on four occasions. In 1999, he obtained the Jacques-Rousseau Prize for Interdisciplinarity from the Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences (Acfas), and the President's Medal from the Operational Research Society (UK). In 2001, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Teaching Excellence by HEC Montréal. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1998, and a Fellow of INFORMS since 2005. In 2005, he was the co-winner of the Glover-Klingman Prize. In 2007 he was awarded the Innis-Gérin Medal from the Royal Society of Canada. In 2009 he received the Gérard-Parizeau Award, he was inducted as the 42nd Honorary Member of the INFORMS International Omega Rho Society, and he received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the Transportation Science and Logistics Section of INFORMS. In 2012, he won the Pierre-Laurin Award from HEC Montréal for his overall career research achievements. In 2014, he was the co-winner of the FICO Global “Optimize the Real World” contest and he received the Lifetime Achievement in Location Analysis Award from the INFORMS Section on Location Analysis. In 2016 the Eindhoven University of Technology awarded him a Doctorate honoris causa and he received the Acfas Urgel-Archambault Prize in physical sciences, mathematics, computer science or engineering. He obtained the FRQNT 2016-2017 Excellence Award. In 2018, he received a Doctorate honoris causa from the Université de Liège, as well as the Marie-Victorin prize awarded by the Quebec government to a researcher in engineering or natural sciences. He also became a member of the Order of Canada. In 2019, he was elected international member of the National Academy of Engineering (USA) and he became a fellow of the EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization. In 2020 he was named Member Emeritus of CORS. In 2021 he won the Killam Prize in Engineering and he received a Doctorate honoris causa from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. In 2022 he received the Euro Gold Medal from the Association of European Operational Research Societies, he was a co-winner one of the SEIO-BBVA Foundation prizes and of the Goodeve Medal awarded by the British OR Society.
Karen Smilowitz is the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the Operations group at the Kellogg School of Management. Dr. Smilowitz is an expert in modeling and solution approaches for logistics and transportation systems in both commercial and nonprofit applications. She has been instrumental in promoting the use of operations research within the humanitarian and nonprofit sectors through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as various media outlets. Dr. Smilowitz is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science and a Fellow of the INFORMS society.
Andy Philpott is world expert in optimization under uncertainty and its application in electricity systems. He is the Director of the Electric Power Optimization Centre (EPOC) at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His work covers a broad range of topics from game-theoretical analyses of electricity market auctions to modelling competition and market power in electricity systems dominated by stored hydroelectricity. Philpott's EPOC group (www.epoc.org.nz) has been a research leader in this field for 20 years. He has consulted throughout the world on electricity optimization to organizations as diverse as EDF, BC Hydro, Hydro Tasmania, Meridian Energy, Contact Energy, Norske Skog, and the New Zealand Electricity Authority. Philpott's research has been motivated by practical problems faced by industry that require some theoretical insight to resolve. This has led to a collection of theoretical publications in top operations research journals. At the same time work has had a significant impact. In 2009 Philpott and a team from Norske Skog were finalists in the Franz Edelman competition for their development (from 1997-2008) and deployment of Norske Skog's PIVOT model. The recommendations emerging from this model saved Norske Skog an estimated (USD)100 M per annum. Philpott has been honoured for his research, being awarded the Hans Daellenbach Award from ORSNZ in 2006, elected to be an INFORMS Fellow in 2017, and a Simons Fellow in 2019. He has given plenary and keynote addresses to major international conferences such as ICSP 2001, ICCOPT 2007, ICSP 2010, SIAM Conference on Optimization 2014, CMS 2018, ISMP 2018, and the IFORS Distinguished Lecture in 2019. He was on the editorial board of Mathematical Programming from 2004-2017, and has been an Associate Editor of Operations Research since 2007. He has served on numerous INFORMS committees (including chairing the Farkas Prize Committee and the INFORMS ENRE Best Paper Prize Committee) and organized several international workshops and thematic programmes. The latest of these was the Mathematics of Energy Systems programme held at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2019.
Frédéric Semet received his PhD from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He is full professor at Centrale Lille, France. His main research activities are in the field of combinatorial optimization applied to location problems, transportation network design problems, and vehicle routing problems. These related problems are encountered from the strategic decision level to the operational decision level in transportation chain management. Frédéric Semet is and has been involved in various grant-funded and collaborative projects with transportation and logistics companies. Currently, he is the scientific leader of a project dedicated to urban distribution in the context of e-commerce and of a regional project on urban logistics. In addition, he is a member of the steering committees of the Verolog (Vehicle Routing and Logistics) group of the European operational research society EURO, of the Groupe de Recherche en Recherche Opérationnelle (GdR RO of the CNRS. Finally, Frédéric Semet is, since 2015, deputy director of the Lille Research Center in Computer Science, Signal and Automation (CRIStAL) gathering about 200 professors and researchers. Frédéric Semet has authored or co-authored more than 75 scientific papers or book chapters. His h-index is 40 (Google Scholar). He has been an associate editor or member of the editorial board of Advances in Operations Research, Computers & Operations Research, and INFOR. He received the President Medal of the British Operational Research Society in 1999 and was awarded the 1st Prize for scientific contribution to the EURO/ROADEF 2016 challenge.
Rubén Ruiz is Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research on leave of absence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. He is co-author of more than 100 papers in International Journals and has participated in presentations of more than a two hundred papers in national and international conferences. He is editor of the Elsevier's JCR-listed journal Operations Research Perspectives (ORP) and co-editor of the JCR-listed journal European Journal of Industrial Engineering (EJIE). He is also associate editor of other journals like TOP and member of the editorial boards of several journals most notably European Journal of Operational Research and Computers and Operations Research. His research interests include scheduling and routing in real life scenarios as well as cloud computing scheduling.
Maryam Darvish is an associate professor in the Department of Operations and Decision Systems at Université Laval in beautiful Quebec City. Her research focuses on applying OR tools and techniques to solve real-world problems, mainly to develop methods to improve the supply chain's economic and environmental efficiency. She is an active member of the Interuniversity Research Center on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). She has published and worked on several projects with CIRRELT members. Her papers are mainly published in EJOR, IJPE, TRE, and IJPR. She is also a co-founder of MobilOpt, a research group founded in collaboration with Leandro Coelho and Jacques Renaud in 2020 at FSA, ULaval, dedicated to mobility optimization. Maryam is the recipient of several research and teaching medals from her faculty and the student association of the faculty. She is from Iran and did her undergraduate and Master's studies there, but she has lived and studied in several countries
Pascal Van Hentenryck is an A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the the director of the NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization. Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of Computer Science at Brown University for about 20 years, he led the optimization research group (about 70 people) at National ICT Australia (NICTA) (until its merger with CSIRO), and was the Seth Bonder Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and INFORMS. He has been awarded two honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Louvain and the university of Nantes, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the Philip J. Bray Award for teaching excellence in the physical sciences at Brown University, the ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, the ICS INFORMS Prize for Research Excellence at the Intersection of Computer Science and Operations Research, and an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He received a Test of Time Award (20 years) from the Association of Logic Programming and numerous best paper awards, including at IJCAI and AAAI. Van Hentenryck has given plenary/semi-plenary talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (twice), the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, the SIAM Optimization Conference, the Annual INFORMS Conference, NIPS, and many other conferences. Van Hentenryck was program co-chair of the AAAI'19 conference, a premier conference in Artificial Intelligence. Van Hentenryck's research focuses in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Operations Research. His current focus is to develop methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy. In the past, his research focused on optimization and the design and implementation of innovative optimization systems, including the CHIP programming system (a Cosytec product), the foundation of all modern constraint programming systems and the optimization programming language OPL (now an IBM Product). Van Hentenryck has also worked on computational biology, numerical analysis, and programming languages, publishing in premier journals in these areas.
Francisco Saldanha da Gama is professor of Operations Research in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has a large teaching experience both in terms of undergraduate and post-graduate programs focusing on the fields of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Discrete Optimization, Stochastic Optimization, Logistics, and Operations Management. Has published extensively in scientific international journals mostly in the areas of supply chain management, logistics, location analysis, project scheduling, and discrete optimization. He has co-edited the two editions of the volume “Location Science” published by Springer International Publishing. Presented above 150 contributed talks in scientific events and has been invited to innumerable scientific events as a plenary/semi-plenary/keynote speaker. Has been awarded several prizes and honors such as the EURO prize for the best EJOR review paper (2012) and the Elsevier prize for the EJOR top cited article 2007–2011 (2012). He has been member of innumerable scientific committees of international conferences and other scientific events. He is member of several international scientific organizations and institutions such as INFORMS, CMAFcIO—Centro de Matemática Aplicações Fundamentais e Investigação Operacional, University of Lisbon, ECCO—European Chapter on Combinatorial Optimization, EWGSO Working Group on Stochastic Optimization, SOLA—INFORMS Section on Location Analysis), and EWGLA—EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis, of which he is one of the past coordinators. Currently he is Editor-in-Chief of Computers & Operations Research as well as member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (UK) and Operations Research Perspectives. His research interests include supply chain management, logistics, decision-making under uncertainty, project scheduling and management.
Greet Vanden Berghe holds a degree in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering (KU Leuven). She has always been interested in mathematical modelling which led her in the direction of pursuing combinatorial optimization research. Her PhD focused on scheduling and particularly on developing a general model for personnel rostering that would be applicable across a wide range of health care organizations. This subject provided the perfect opportunity to initiate cooperation with the University of Nottingham, where she spent a one-year research stay. In 2002, she obtained a PhD in Engineering Science (Ghent University). Greet Vanden Berghe was appointed as professor at KU Leuven, Department of Computer Science in October 2014. She is currently a member of research unit NUMA (Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics) and leads the CODeS research group located at KU Leuven-Gent. Operational research represents Greet Vanden Berghe's primary research interest. Within the broad domain of operational research she focuses on complex combinatorial optimization problems. Examples of such problems include personnel scheduling, vehicle routing and all sorts of logistic operations. Her fundamental research activities involve mathematical modelling and the development of intelligent search algorithms such as heuristics and decomposition methods. She has successfully developed many heuristic decomposition algorithms, smart ways of tightening objectives or relaxing constraints, heuristics based on lower and upper bounding, and general-purpose local search operators. These new algorithm components have helped achieve the best computational results in several international competitions and benchmarking challenges. When studying industrial combinatorial optimization problems, especially their complicated constraints and objectives, Greet Vanden Berghe's team experienced that theory almost always falls short when it comes to efectively solving real-world problems. These insights led to the development of completely new yet highly efficient models and algorithms for industrial problems. Interestingly, developments for industrial-scale optimization problems often result in new theoretical insights given the inevitable need to simplify reality when modelling. Indeed, these new modelling methodologies are competitive with and often better than state-of-the-art algorithms focused on theoretical problems. CODeS provides benchmarks for various international challenges involving problems such as pickup and delivery, vehicle routing and sports timetabling. Greet Vanden Berghe cooperates with industry within many applied research projects (supported by VLAIO or by the companies themselves). These projects target the internal use of optimization algorithms for real-world applications. Implementations of these algorithms are often deployed in more generally applicable decision support systems.
Ricardo Fukasawa is a Professor at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. He did his undergraduate and Masters in Electrical Engineering at PUC-Rio in Brazil. He worked at GAPSO Inc from 2000-2003. He then did a PhD in the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization program at GeorgiaTech. He was a recipient of the IBM Herman Goldstine Postdoctoral fellowship from 2008-2009, and moved to Waterloo afterwards. He received the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. He is an Associate editor of Operations Research, OR Letters, RAIRO-OR and INFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research, and a Technical Editor for Mathematical Programming Computation. He has publications in several prestigious international journals like Mathematical Programming, Math of OR, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Mathematical Programming Computation and Transportation Science. His research interests are in developing theory and computational tools for the exact solution of hard discrete optimization problems, as well as their applications in practical problems. He has contributions in several areas, including Integer Programming, Vehicle Routing, Stochastic Programming, Bilevel Programming, as well as several applications.
Martin Savelsbergh is a logistics and optimization specialist with over 30 years of experience in mathematical modeling, operations research, optimization methods, algorithm design, performance analysis, transport, supply chain management, and production planning. He has published over 200 research papers in many of the top operations research and optimization journals and has supervised more than 30 Ph.D. students. Martin has a track record of creating innovative techniques for solving large-scale optimization problems in a variety of areas, ranging from service network design, to last-mile and crowdsourced delivery, to ridesharing. He has demonstrated an ability to design and implement highly sophisticated and effective optimization algorithms as well as an ability to analyze practical decision problems and translate the insights obtained into optimal business solutions. Martin is an INFORMS fellow and he was the James C. Edenfield Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology until he retired in 2021. Martin is past Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the area of transportation science and logistics.
Pooja Dewan is the Vice President and Chief Data Analytics Officer for Otis Elevator Company. She is responsible for driving the data and analytics vision, strategy, and execution. In this critical role, she leads the company's data science and analytics capabilities, identifying opportunities to accelerate growth and efficiency. She also owns the Otis data management roadmap driving sustainable business growth and profitability, as well as internal efficiencies through improved access to through data architecture, constant data cleanliness and insight, and efficient data governance and processes. Prior to this role, Pooja spent more than 20 years at BNSF Railway where she served as the Chief Data Scientist. There she led the Operations Research and Advanced Analytics group for 17 years. Her team received international recognition through an INFORMS award as the Best Advanced Analytics Team in 2019. Pooja has been a member of INFORMS (Operations Research Society) since 1993. During this time, she led several initiatives offered by INFORMS, including the Chairing of Edelman competition the prized Practice Award, various officer roles for Practice and Railway Section including being the President. In addition to her role for Practice and Railway section she has also been instrumental in championing activities that help bridge the gap between academia and real-world application and is currently serving on several Advisory Boards. Pooja earned a master's and doctorate in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania State University. She is also the author of several research publications in various scientific journals.
Ramayya Krishnan is the W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at the H. John Heinz III College of Information Systems and Public Policy and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the CMU faculty in 1988. He is the Founding Dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and has held that position since 2009. Krishnan's education spans engineering, operations research, statistics and computing (the data sciences). He studied Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and then went on to complete a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the Cockrell School of Engineering and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems at the McCombs School of Business, both at the University of Texas at Austin. A distinctive feature of his work has been deep partnerships with firms and government agencies and the pursuit of work that has made foundational contributions to science while making a real-world impact. His multi-disciplinary research program has involved faculty and students, undergraduate and graduate, from nearly all the Colleges and Schools at the university. He has been a serial academic entrepreneur and established multiple, externally funded, university-wide research centers at CMU. He founded the Master of Information Systems Management program in 1998 and is currently leading the creation and launch of new undergraduate programs at the nexus of systems thinking, information systems, and data analytics. His scholarly contributions to Operations Research, Information Systems, and analytics, and his editorial and leadership activities resulted in his being elected an AAAS Fellow, an INFORMS Fellow, and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He has been deeply engaged in policy work both at home and abroad. He led the CMU Task Force supporting Gov. Wolf in economic recovery and reopening in 2020-2021. In 2022, he was appointed to the National AI advisory committee which is charged with advising the President and the White House National AI Initiatives Office. He is a recipient of the distinguished alumnus award of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the University of Texas at Austin. He served as the 25th President of INFORMS, the global operations research and analytics society, in 2019 and a three year term on its executive committee from 2017-2020.
Jeff Linderoth is the Harvey D. Spangler Professor in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a courtesy appointment in the Computer Sciences department and as a Discovery Fellow at the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery. His research interests include optimization, integer programming, mixed integer nonlinear programming and stochastic optimization. His awards include an Early Career Award from the Department of Energy, the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Prize, and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize. In 2016, Jeff was elected to membership as an INFORMS Fellow. He acted as Associate Editor for highly important OR journals such as Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing and Computational Optimization and Applications. He also acted as consultant for more than 10 companies and supervised 11 PhD dissertations.