Plenaries and Semi-Plenaries

Laura A. Albert is the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs & Development in the College of Engineering and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as the President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2023 and the David H. Gustafson Department Chair of ISyE at UW-Madison from 2021-24. She is the founder of Industrial and Systems Engineering Day, celebrated annually on September 14. Dr. Albert’s research focuses on mitigating risks in the public sector through optimization and operations research methodologies, with applications in critical infrastructure protection, public safety, and emergency response. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), INFORMS, and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE). Her work has been recognized with the INFORMS Impact Prize, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a Fulbright Award. An advocate for public engagement and the promotion of industrial engineering, Dr. Albert has penned several op-eds for national news outlets, and she authors the engineering blogs “Punk Rock Operations Research” and “Badger Bracketology.”

Andrea Lodi is an Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. He is a member of both the Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Computer Science fields at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Mathematical Sciences Department, NY in 2005–2006, full professor of Operations Research at DEI, University of Bologna 2007-2015, and Canada Excellence Research Chair in “Data Science for Real-time Decision Making” at Polytechnique Montréal 2015-2022. His main research interests are in Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Programming and Data-driven Optimization, and his work has received several recognitions including the IBM and Google faculty awards. Andrea is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Farkas Prize and has been elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2023. Andrea has been the principal investigator of scientific projects (often involving industrial partners) for Italy, European Union, Canada, and USA. In the period 2006-2021, he was a consultant of the IBM CPLEX research and development team, developing CPLEX, one of the leading software for Mixed-Integer Optimization.

Hande Yaman is a Professor of Operations Research at the Faculty of Economics and Business of KU Leuven. She obtained her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Université libre de Bruxelles. Before joining KU Leuven, she was a faculty member in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University. Her research interests include polyhedral approaches for mixed-integer programming, with applications in production planning, logistics, and network design as well as optimization under uncertainty.

Güzin Bayraksan is a Professor and Associate Chair for Research in the Integrated Systems Engineering Department at the Ohio State University, with affiliations in the Sustainability Institute and the Translational Data Analytics Institute. Her research focuses on optimization under uncertainty, including stochastic, risk-averse, and distributionally robust optimization, and algorithm development for solving complex decision-making problems. She applies these models and methods to solve critical societal problems in water resources management and water-energy-transportation infrastructure design and operation. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, and Operations Research, and has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. Prof. Bayraksan is the recipient of numerous honors, including the NSF CAREER Award and the INFORMS ENRE Best Publication Award. She has held prominent leadership and editorial roles within the Operations Research and Optimization communities, including as Chair of Stochastic Programming Society (2019-2023), Vice Chair of Optimization under Uncertainty of INFORMS Optimization Society, and President of INFORMS Forum for Women in Operations Research and Management Science.

Margarida Carvalho is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and a former FRQ–IVADO Research Chair. Her research focuses on integer programming games and bilevel optimization, with applications in health, sustainable development, and education, including kidney exchange programs, electric vehicle adoption, and school choice. She received the 2018 EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2023 Teaching Excellence Award from the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is also a founding board member and elected treasurer of the Bilevel Optimization Society.

Jannis Kurtz is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Mathematics from TU Dortmund University, where his dissertation was awarded the Faculty of Mathematics’ dissertation prize. Afterwards, he was a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen University and a visiting professor at the University of Siegen. His research lies at the intersection of robust and bilevel optimization, machine learning, and explainability, with applications in radiotherapy and logistics. He has published in Mathematical Programming and the SIAM Journal on Optimization, as well as at AI conferences such as NeurIPS and ICLR. He co-hosts the Robust Optimization Webinar (ROW) and the Explainable Optimization website (http://www.expopt.org/).

Virginie Lurkin is Associate Professor in the Department of Operations at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. Her research lies at the intersection of operations research, discrete choice modelling, and transportation. Her work in routing and city logistics addresses the design and coordination of complex urban distribution systems, including synchronized two-echelon vehicle routing. Another part of her research examines systems in which individual behaviour interacts with operational decisions, including tactical time-slot management under heterogeneous customer choice.

More recently, she has brought these perspectives to sustainable mobility. Through the interdisciplinary STRIVE “Switzerland by Bike” programme and the SNSF-funded B+RAID project, which she leads, she studies cycling and bike-and-ride as components of integrated public-transport systems, combining behavioural modelling, accessibility analysis, geospatial and mobility data, simulation, and demand-informed optimization.

Across these domains, her current research develops a broader perspective on optimization with endogenous response: how decisions change human behaviour, how those responses propagate into demand, feasibility, and operational structure, and how this coupling can be exploited in the design and optimization of complex systems.

Maximilian Schiffer is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems and Operations Management department at HEC Paris and holds the Hi! PARIS Chair in “Artificial Intelligence for Decision Making in Business” at HEC Paris, supported by the France 2030 AI Cluster programme. Prior to joining HEC, he was a tenured Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from RWTH Aachen University in 2017 and subsequently held a visiting postdoctoral scholar position at Stanford University. His research operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and operations research. Specifically, his work focuses on Decision-Focused Learning, Structured Reinforcement Learning, and stochastic optimization, developing methodologies for high-impact business decision-making in operations, supply chains, and transportation. He regularly publishes in top-tier Operations Research and Management Science journals, including Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and Production and Operations Management. Additionally, his work frequently appears at leading machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and AAAI.

Rafał Weron is Professor of Economic Sciences at Wrocław University of Science and Technology and a leading expert in electricity price forecasting. His research spans energy forecasting, computational statistics and machine learning, computational economics and finance, complex systems, and risk management. He is a member of Academia Europaea, the Center for Research in Energy at Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences, and the Statistics and Econometrics Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Wolfram Wiesemann is Professor of Analytics & Operations at the Analytics, Marketing & Operations department at Imperial College Business School. His research interests evolve around decision-making under uncertainty, with applications to logistics, supply chain management and healthcare. Wolfram has served as an elected member of the boards of the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Stochastic Programming Society, and he currently serves as editor in-chief of Operations Research Letters as well as a department co-editor for Management Science.

Sonja Wogrin is a Full Professor in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), where she heads the Institute of Electricity Economics and Energy Innovation and serves as spokesperson for the TU Graz Research Center for Energy Economics and Energy Analytics. Her research lies at the intersection of operations research, energy economics, and power systems, with a focus on optimization, decision-making, and computational methods for the transition to climate-neutral energy systems. She is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2023–2028) for her project “Data Aggregation for Net-Zero Power Systems.” Wogrin holds degrees in Technical Mathematics from TU Graz and in Computation for Design and Optimization from MIT, and received her PhD from Universidad Pontificia Comillas. She is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Senior Member of IEEE. In 2023, she was named “Austrian of the Year” by Die Presse in the climate initiative category.