CONGRATULATIONS to Prof. Héctor Cancela who has been nominated and duly elected as President of IFORS for 2025-2027. CONGRATULATIONS also to Dr. Rina Schneur who has been nominated and duly elected as Vice- President of IFORS for the same term. We look forward to IFORS’ continual success under their leadership!
President 2025-2027 – Prof. Héctor Cancela (Uruguay)
Héctor Cancela holds a PhD. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rennes 1, INRIA Rennes, France (1996), and a Computer Systems Engineer degree from the Universidad de la República, Uruguay (1990).
He was the Head of the Operations Research Department of the Universidad de la República between 1997 and 2004, and later Dean of the Engineering School of the same university (2010-2015). His research interests are centered in network models and stochastic models, applied jointly with optimization methods for solving problems in different areas (reliability, communications, transport, production, biological applications, agricultural applications, etc). He has published more than 100 full papers in international journals, indexed conference proceedings and book chapters. He has supervised more than 20 Ph.D. and M.Sc. thesis.
He is an associated editor of the journals International Transactions in Operations Research (ITOR), RAIRO-Operations Research (RAIRO-OR), Mathematical Methods of Operations Research (MMOR), Computational and Applied Mathematics (COAM), and member of the editorial board of the journals Pesquisa Operacional (Brazil), CLEI electronic journal, and Ingenieria de Sistemas (Chile).
He is a member of AUDIIO (Asociacion Uruguaya de Informática e Investigación de Operaciones – the Uruguayan Operations Research and Computing Society), and participated as representative of AUDIIO at IFORS. He was a member of the board of ALIO (Asociación Latino Ibero Americana de Investigación Operativa) for several periods, as Secretary, Vice-president and President. He has been involved in the organization of several CLAIO (Latin-Iberoamerican Conference on Operations Research) and ELAVIO Latin American Summer School on Operations Research).
Vice-President 2025-2027 – Dr. Rina Schneur (USA)
Rina Schneur is an Operations Research scientist and has focused her career on applying analytics methodologies to industry problems. She was a Dir. of Business Analytics at Verizon, Sr. manage at Sabre Technologies and did her Post Doc. at the Math. Dept. of IBM Research Center. Rina also served on Verizon’s energy board. In 1999 Rina co-founded Emptoris Inc., a procurement solution provider, and served on its advisory board for ten years. Rina served on INFORMS’ board for seven years, as VP Meetings and President. She has been the IFORS VP representing NORAM since 2022. She also co-founded and has since been serving on the Informs ProBono analytics committee. Rina is currently leading and active with various grass roots and philanthropic organizations. Rina graduated from The Technion with a BSc. In Engineering and from MIT with a MSc and PhD in Engineering and Advanced Analytics with focus on Network Optimization.