Officers
Héctor Cancela, President 2025-2027
Héctor Cancela is a Full Professor at the Operations Research Department of the Universidad de la Repúblic, where he served as Dean of the Engineering School between 2010 and 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 organized and served in the program committees of many international and regional conferences and is an associate editor of several journals. 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; and has participated in other international associations in different positions.
Janny Leung, Past President 2022-2024
Janny Leung is the Master of Choi Kai Yau College and Professor at the State Key Lab of Internet of Things for Smart City at the University of Macau. Her main research interests are combinatorial optimization, transportation and logistics. Her research has been well-supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the U.S. National Science Foundation. She has been plenary speaker at international conferences, and serves on the editorial boards of several leading journals. She was the President of the Informs Forum on Women in OR/MS in 2001, and was elected a Fellow of Informs in 2020. She served as the Scientific Program Chair for the 19th Triennial IFORS Conference held in Melbourne in 2011, and was the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer at the Athens EURO conference in 2021.
Rina Schneur, Vice President
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 is currently serving on the 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.
Marco Laumanns, Treasurer
Marco has served as Treasurer of the International Federation of the Operational Research Society (IFORS) since 2024. Previously he served as Treasurer of the Swiss Operations Research Society (SVOR) from 2012 until 2022.
Sibel Alumur Alev, VP representing NORAM
Dr. Alumur Alev is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She received her Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University in 2009 and subsequently served as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Operations Research at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Before joining the University of Waterloo in 2014, she worked as an Assistant Professor at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara. 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 is the Founding President of the Transportation & Logistics Special Interest Group of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) and also served as a Councillor for CORS. She has guest-edited four special journal issues to date and currently serves as an Associate Editor for several journals including Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, Service Science, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. 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.
Greet Vanden Berghe, VP representing EURO
Greet Vanden Berghe is professor at the Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven. She is a member of NUMA (Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics) and leads CODeS (Combinatorial Optimization and Decision Support) research group based at KU Leuven's Campus in Gent. Her research focuses on combinatorial optimisation problems. She is particularly interested in addressing operational problems, both in industry and health care, for example in
* modelling operational optimization problems, as to enable the use of general purpose algorithms,
* developing efficient and effective heuristics to a wide range of combinatorial optimisation problems from practice, including personnel rostering, vehicle routing, port and waterway operations,
* developing general approaches to problems incorporating both components from scheduling and vehicle routing, such as home care scheduling.
José-Fernando Camacho-Vallejo, VP representing ALIO
Fernando is an Associate Research Professor at the Industrial Engineering Department in Tecnologico de Monterrey. He is a mathematician with graduate studies in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University, and Tecnologico de Monterrey (PhD). Fernando is a Level II member of the National System of Researchers and a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Additionally, he served as the president of the Mexican Society of Operations Research from 2020 to 2022. He is member of the advisory board of the Bilevel Optimization Society and the Mexican Society of Mathematics. Also, he is co-chair of the IEEE task force on Evolutionary Bilevel Optimization. His main research interests include general topics in Operations Research, with a focus on the mathematical modelling of hierarchized decision systems under a bilevel optimization perspective and the design of heuristic algorithms.
Yu-Hong Dai, VP representing APORS
Professor Yu-Hong Dai is Full Professor and Vice President of Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His main research interests are nonlinear optimization, integer programming, and applied optimization. He was invited to give 45-minute invited talk on the International Congress of Mathematicians (2022) and one-hour plenary talk on the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (2022)．He received Feng Kang Scientific Computing Award (2015), Shiing-Shen Chern Mathematics Award of CMS (2017) and the first Xiao Shutie Applied Mathematics Award of CSIAM (2018). He was elected a Fellow of IFORS in 2023. Currently, he is the Immediate Past President of the Association of Asia Pacific Operational Research Societies (APORS), President of the Operations Research Society of China (ORSC) and Vice President of the Chinese Mathematical Society (CMS), as well as editors-in-chief of the journals Operational Research Transactions (an ORSC journal) and Journal of Computational Mathematics.
Gavin Blackett, IFORS Secretary
Gavin Blackett has served as the Secretariat on the Administrative Committee of the International Federation of the Operational Research Society (IFORS) since 2023. Previously he served as Executive Director for the UK Operational Research Society for over 16 years, following a career as an OR consultant.