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Andrés Weintraub holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Chile a Masters in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Chile. His main research areas are Operations Research, Operations Management in forestry and mining, logistics and transportation. His latest research has been in decision making related to fuel management and forest fires.

He has published over 90 papers in recognized journals, including Operations Research, Management Science, Forest Science, the European Journal of Operations Research.  His Scopus H is 44.  He has also edited several books and journal issues on topics related to Operations Research in forestry and mining.  He has carried out multiple projects with industry and governmental organizations, including  the US Forest Service and forest firms in Chile in models related to long range planning, short term harvesting and transportation, CODELCO, one of the largest copper firms in the world in models related to long range copper extraction, CSAV, a top 10 worldwide shipping company, housed in Chile, to improve the management of their 500.000 container business, the Chilean Ministry of Education, on determining best locations of rural schools, the Chilean Salmon industry in developing models to plan the salmon production chain and short term transportation,  and the Chilean Football Association in scheduling the football season since 2005. The work with Chilean forest firms won the Edelman Prize, the most prestigious award for applied Operations Research, awarded by INFORMS, the US Society for Operations Research and Management Sciences. The work with CSAV was an Edelman finalist in 2011 and the football scheduling was a finalist in 2016.

He has grants as principal investigator by Fondecyt, (the individual Research Program from the Chilean National Research Agency) since 1982 when the program was started, except for one year. Papers he has co-authored have been chosen as best of the years 2013, 2014, 2015 by the Energy and Natural Resources Group of INFORMS. 

He has received many recognitions which include: The Chilean National Prize for Applied Science in 2000, the Harold Larnder Prize given by the Canadian OR Society, the INFORMS Presidential Prize, the Gold Medal from the Chilean Institute of Engineering, its highest recognition.  He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Agricultural Sciences of Sweden, and the University of Laval, Canada. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and the Chilean National Academies of Science and of Engineering and is an INFORMS Fellow. He was a founder and former President of ALIO, the Latin American Association of OR, and President of IFORS, the International Federation of Operations Research Societies, which includes over 50 country members, for the years 1998 to 2000. He led from 2007 to 2018 the Institute for Complex Engineering Systems, which is currently funded yearly with 3 million dollars, and involves 50 researchers and a staff of 15 people. The Institute covers areas such as Operations Research, Data Science, Industrial Organization and Consumer Analytics. The Institute is strong in developing projects with industry and the government which are original and have impact. 

Vašek Chvátal was born in Prague and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics in the same city. He left Czechoslovakia in August 1968, three days after its Soviet-led invasion. Having earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in the fall of 1970, he taught mathematics, computer science, and operations research at McGill, Stanford, Université de Montréal, and Rutgers. From 2004 till his retirement in 2014, he held a Canada Research Chair, first in Combinatorial Optimization and then in Discrete Mathematics, at Concordia University in Montreal. His research agenda has ranged from graph theory and combinatorics to linear programming and cutting planes to analysis of algorithms to the traveling salesman problem. In 2015, he shared the John von Neumann Theory Prize 'for seminal and profound contributions to the theoretical foundations of optimization'  with Jean Bernard Lasserre. His most recent book, "The Discrete Mathematical Charms of Paul Erdős", was published last August by Cambridge University Press.

Warren B. Powell is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years, and is currently the Chief Analytics Officer at Optimal Dynamics. He is the founder and director of CASTLE Labs, which spans contributions to models and algorithms in stochastic optimization, with applications to energy systems, transportation, health, e-commerce, and the laboratory sciences (see www.castlelab.princeton.edu). He has pioneered the use of approximate dynamic programming for high-dimensional applications, and the knowledge gradient for active learning problems. His recent work has focused on developing a unified framework for sequential decision problems under uncertainty, spanning active learning to a wide range of dynamic resource allocation problems. He has authored books on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Optimal Learning, and he has a new book coming up entitled "Reinforcement Learning and Stochastic Optimization: A unified framework for sequential decisions". Dr. Powell is an INFORMS fellow and a recipient of numerous prizes including the prestigious Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science.

Radhika Kulkarni retired as VP, Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS Institute Inc. where she was responsible for the world’s leading Analytics Software products portfolio. She holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. Under her leadership, OR gained recognition as a key contributor to scalability and performance of algorithms in statistics, machine learning, forecasting, data mining, econometrics, etc. She serves on many academic advisory boards. Dr. Kulkarni is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and a WORMS Award winner and is currently the President-Elect of INFORMS. In 2022, she will be the President of INFORMS.

Teodor Gabriel Crainic is Full Professor of Operations Research, Transportation, and Logistics, and holds the Chair on Intelligent Logistics and Transportation Systems Planning in the School of Management, Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, and senior scientist at CIRRELT, the Interuniversity Research Center for Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation, where he is Director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory. Professor Crainic is a member of the Royal Society of Canada – The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada. He co-founded, in 1991, the TRISTAN - TRienial Symposium on Transportation Analysis and, in 2000, the Odysseus - International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics series of international meetings. He contributes to several editorial boards. He was President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS, Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (currently CIRRELT), and received the 2006 Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society. The research interests of Professor Crainic are in network, integer, and combinatorial optimization, meta-heuristics, and parallel computing applied to the planning and management of complex systems, particularly in transportation and logistics. Major contributions targeted the design, scheduling and management of consolidation-based carrier services, including uncertainty, resource and revenue management considerations, as well as routing and scheduling, Intelligent Transportation Systems, City Logistics, new business and organizational transportation and logistics models, regional planning of multimodal freight transportation systems, and combinatorial electronic markets. Professor Crainic published some 290 scientific papers and chapters, and has a h-index of 77 (Google Scholar). He co-edited the Network Design with Applications in Transportation and Logistics book published by Springer in 2021, as well as numerous special issues of major scientific journals. He supervised over 160 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Sibel Alumur Alev is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. She received her Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University in 2009. She then worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Institute of Operations Research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Prior to joining the University of Waterloo in 2014, she worked as an Assistant Professor at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara. In 2017, she received the Chuck ReVelle Rising Star Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a recognition of her research accomplishments in Location Analysis. She guest-edited two special issues in the journal Computers & Operations Research, one on “Recent Advances in Location Analysis”, and another on “Recent Advances in Hub Location”. She served as a Board Member for the EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis (EWGLA) and as the President of the INFORMS Section on Location Analysis (SOLA). She currently serves as the Senior Associate Editor for the journal Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, an Editorial Board Editor for Transportation Research Part B, and an Editorial Board Member for Computers & Operations Research. Her research was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), including a “National Young Researchers Career Development Grant” given in 2012, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS). She organized clusters, streams, and sessions at several international conferences. Her research interests lie in optimizing facility locations and logistics operations, in particular, hub location, hub network design, supply chain and reverse logistics network design.

Graham Rand retired as a senior lecturer in Operational Research at Lancaster University, UK in 2016. He has been Council Member and Conference Chairman of the British Operational Research Society, and was editor of the Journal of the Operational Research Society for six years from 1991-1996. Since 2014 he has edited the Society’s magazine, Impact. For the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) he was Vice-President (1998-2000) and has been editor of both International Abstracts in Operations Research (from 1980-1991) and International Transactions in Operational Research (2000-05). He was editor of the proceedings of the IFORS Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1987, and Chairman of the Program Committee for the IFORS Conference held in Athens in 1990.  For the European Association of Operational Research Societies he was chairman of the Gold Medal jury in 1995.  He was a founder member of both the International Society for Inventory Research (1983) and the Operations Management Association (1985). He was President of Omega Rho, the international honor society for Operational Research in 2012-2014. The Operational Research Society made him a Companion of Operational research in 2006, and he was made a Fellow by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies in 2021.

José Fernando Gonçalves (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon, with contributions in the fields of operations research, and applied mathematics. He is most known for his work with metaheuristics, in particular Biased Random-key Genetic Algorithms (BRKGA), as well as for his work on the job-shop scheduling.  His areas of expertise are Optimization, Heuristics and Metaheuristics, Scheduling, Cutting and Packing, Facility Layout, Inventory Management, and Operations Research Modeling. He has published over 50 papers on combinatorial optimization and edited a book on inventory management. He is on the editorial board of International Transactions in Operational Research. He was a Professor at the School of Engineering and the School of Economics of Porto University 1986-2016.

Dimitris Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research, the Associate Dean of Business Analytics and the faculty director of the Master of Business Analytics at the Sloan School of Managemnet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, an INFORMS fellow, recipient of the John von Neumann theory prize, the Frederick W. Lanchester and the INFORMS president awards among many other research and teaching awards, supervisor of 81 completed and 26 current doctoral theses and co-founder of ten analytics companies as well as of the Analytics for a Better World movement (analyticsbw.org).

Professor Janny Leung is the Master of Choi Kai Yau College and affiliated with the State Key Lab of Internet of Things for Smart City at the University of Macau. She obtained an S.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Radcliffe College, a B.A. in Mathematics from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before returning to Hong Kong, she was a faculty member at Yale University and the University of Arizona.  Her main research interests are combinatorial optimization, transportation logistics and operational research. In Hong Kong, she has collaborated with local companies on projects involving workforce scheduling, facility layout, and public transit planning. She has been invited as plenary speaker at major international conferences, and serves on the editorial boards of the leading journals in her field. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, and appointed to the Hong Kong Logistics Development Council (LOGSCOUNCIL). She was elected a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (Informs) in 2020. She will serve as President of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) for 2022-2024.  In her spare time, she enjoys rowing, hiking and travelling, having visited all seven continents.