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.