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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 was awarded the EURO Gold Medal in 1997, and he became an INFORMS fellow in 2004. In 2011, 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.