Brief biography

M.Grazia Speranza is Professor of Operations Research at the University of Brescia and currently serves as Vice Rector. She was Vice-President of IFORS in 2008-2009, President of EURO in 2011-2012 and President of TSL (Transportation Science and Logistics) society of INFORMS in 2014. Her main scientific interests are: mixed integer programming, transportation and logistics, portfolio optimization. She is author of more than 150 papers published in international journals. She has been plenary speaker at several international conferences and editor of scientific journals. She is currently co-editor of the series ‘EURO Advanced Tutorials in Operational Research’.

Brief biography
James J. Cochran earned a BS in Economics, an MS in Economics, and an MBA from Wright State University in 1982, 1984, and 1986, respectively. He earned in PhD in Statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997. Dr. Cochran’s research focuses on problems at the interface of statistics and operations research, and he has taught a wide variety of statistics and operations courses from the introductory undergraduate level through PhD seminars. Cochran is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Wiley Series in Operations Research and Management Science, and INFORMS Analytics Body of Knowledge. He has published fourteen book chapters and over forty research articles, and he is coauthor of seven textbooks in statistics, operations research, and analytics. He has served as a consultant to a wide variety of corporations around the world. He was a founding co-chair of Statistics without Borders and a member of the founding committee for INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics initiative. He has also delivered keynote addresses to conferences in twenty-five nations.

Brief biography

Mauricio G. C. Resende, Ph.D.
Amazon Research and University of Washington
Seattle, Washington – USA

Mauricio G. C. Resende grew up in Rio de Janeiro (BR), West Lafayette (IN-US), and Amherst (MA-US). He did his undergraduate training in electrical engineering (systems engineering concentration) at the Pontifical Catholic U. of Rio de Janeiro. He obtained an MS in operations research from Georgia Tech and a PhD in operations research from the U. of California, Berkeley. He is most known for his work with metaheuristics, in particular GRASP and biased random-key genetic algorithms, as well as for his work with interior point methods for linear programming and network flows. Dr. Resende has published over 200 papers on optimization and holds 15 U.S. patents. He has edited the Handbook of Heuristics (Springer, 2018), the Handbook of Optimization in Telecommunications (Springer, 2006), the Handbook of Massive Data Sets (Kluwer, 2002), and the Handbook of Applied Optimization (Oxford, 2002), and is coauthor of the book Optimization by GRASP (Springer, 2016). He sits on the editorial boards of several optimization journals, including Networks, Discrete Optimization, J. of Global Optimization, R.A.I.R.O., and International Transactions in Operational Research. Dr. Resende is an INFORMS Fellow.