Meet this year's plenary speakers


Michel Gendreau is Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering of Polytechnique Montréal (Canada). His main research area is the application of operations research methods to a wide range of problem areas: transportation and logistics systems planning and operation, energy production and storage, healthcare, and telecommunications. Dr. Gendreau has published more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, as well as numerous book chapters. He is also the co-editor of eight books dealing with transportation planning and scheduling, as well as with metaheuristics.

Dr. Gendreau was the Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (formerly CRT and now CIRRELT) from 1999 to 2007. He was Editor in chief of Transportation Science from 2009 to 2014 and has been a member of the editorial board of several other journals. A former President of the Canadian Operational Research Society, he was also Vice-President of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) from 2001 to 2003, from 2007 to 2009, and from 2013 to 2015, as well as Vice-President, International Activities of The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) from 2006 to 2009.

In 2001, he received the Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society in recognition of his contributions to the development of O.R. in Canada. He was elected Fellow of INFORMS in 2010 and became a fellow of IFORS in 2022. In 2015, Dr. Gendreau received the prestigious Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award of the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS.

Michel Gendreau

Jeroen Mulder works for the Air France-KLM Group CIO Office as technology innovation project manager. He has a background in mathematics, a PhD in algebraic geometry, and more than 25 years of experience as operations research analyst and data scientist. He has extensive experience in setting up simulation, optimisation, and statistical models for various business divisions, like Operations Control Centre, Hub Control Centre, Engineering and Maintenance, and Revenue Management at Air France-KLM.

Jeroen worked and lived in Paris for five years as part of the French Operations Research team responsible for developing the forecasting and optimisation models in the joint Revenue Management system of Air France-KLM.

In his current role as technology innovation project manager his mission is to accelerate innovation inside Air France-KLM with new technologies judging the right balance between benefits and risks. Examples of such technologies include Generative AI and Quantum technologies.

Jeroen Mulder

Dr Sanja Petrovic is a Professor of Operational Research (OR) in Nottingham University Business School, UK. She has conducted and led multi-disciplinary research into development of models, heuristics and algorithms for a variety of real-world optimisation and scheduling problems, including radiotherapy planning, scheduling of patients, employee timetabling, production scheduling, vehicle routing problems and university timetabling.

Her research areas include optimisation methods and meta-heuristics, case-based reasoning, multicriteria decision making, data-mining, and fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. Sanja has been the principal and co-investigator on projects mostly funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Technology Strategy Board. Sanja was a Vice-president of the UK OR Society in two terms (2013-2018), Chair of the Committee of Professors of OR in the UK (COPIOR) 2018 - 2021, and a Co-ordinator of the EURO (European Association of OR Societies) Working group on Automated Timetabling since 2006.

Sanja is President-Elect of the Operational Research Society, with a forthcoming role of President in the period 2025-2026. She was a guest co-editor for special issues of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Journal of Scheduling and Annals of Operations Research. She is a Member of the International Advisory Board of the IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, Associate Editor of the Journal of Scheduling and a member of the Editorial Board of the Yugoslav Journal of Operations Research (YUJOR). She was Chair of the UK OR conference - OR53, held in Nottingham in 2011. She has published around 60 papers in international scientific journals and 30 book chapters and has supervised 19 PhD students to completion. Sanja was included in the prestigious Stanford University Top 2% Scientists Ranking in 2023.

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