Dr. Robert Bixby has a BS in IEOR from U.C. Berkeley (1968), and a PhD in OR from Cornell (1972). He has held academic positions at the University of Kentucky, Northwestern University, and Rice University. He is currently Noah Harding Professor Emeritus at Rice University and visiting Professor of Mathematics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization in 1987, and co-founded Gurobi Optimization in 2008, serving as CEO from 2008-2015. Dr. Bixby has published over fifty journal articles and is an acknowledged expert on the computational aspects of linear and integer programming. He has won the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society, and the INFORMS Impact and Frederick W. Lanchester Prizes. He was Editor-in-Chief Mathematical Programming, Series A, 1989-1994, and Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society, 2001-2004. In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Changhyun Kwon is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST. His research aims to advance computational optimization methods for efficient transportation and logistics systems. His current focus is to improve the efficiency of heuristic and exact algorithms using machine-learning approaches to solve large-scale vehicle routing problems and mobility service operations problems. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from Penn State and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from KAIST in 2000. His research has been published in Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, INFORMS Journal on Computing, etc. Before joining KAIST, he was a faculty member at the University at Buffalo and the University of South Florida. Currently, he is on the Editorial Boards of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, and the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of TRB. He was the Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG of the INFORMS TSL Society and is the current International Liaison for Asia/Oceania. He wrote the book "Julia Programming for Operations Research," and he is a member of the JuMP steering committee, an open-source community for developing mathematical optimization tools in Julia. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song is the R. David Thomas Professor of Business Administration and a Professor of Operations Management at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. Professor Song holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She studies supply chain management and operations strategy, topics including supply chain inventory optimization and resilience strategies, Assemble-to Order systems and supply chain flexibility, dynamic pricing and inventory control, data-driven operational decision-making, supply chain digitization, e-commerce strategies and network design, and socially responsible operations. She has published numerous articles in leading academic journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. She has edited and co-edited two books, “Research Handbook on Inventory Management” and “Supply Chain Structures: Coordination, Information and Optimization.” She has also co-authored the book “The Art of Matching: Joy of Living and Operations Innovations” (in Chinese). Professor Song is an INFORMS Fellow, a Distinguished Fellow and former President of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society, and a Department Editor for Management Science and Service Science. She is also a former Area Editor for Operations Research and IIE Transactions. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Overseas Young Scholar Award（海外 出青年）by the Natural Science Foundation of China and was named a Chang Jiang Chaired Professor by the Ministry of Education in China (教育部长江学者讲座教授).

Karla Hoffman is a Professor in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department at George Mason University (GMU) where she served as Chair for five years. She received her D.Sc. from George Washington University in operations research. Prior to her position at GMU, she worked as a mathematician in the Center for Applied Mathematics of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where, in 1984, she was awarded the Applied Research Award. Her other awards include George Mason University's Distinguished Faculty Award, the INFORMS Fellows Award, the INFORMS George E. Kimball Medal and the INFORMS Edelman Prize. Recently, she was inducted as a Fellow of IFORS (The International Federation of OR Societies). She served as President of INFORMS in 1999 and has also served on the Executive Committees of ORSA, IFORS, and the Mathematical Programming Society. She has served on multiple editorial boards. Dr. Hoffman’s primary areas of research are optimization and auction design and testing. Her research focuses on the development of new algorithms for solving complex problems arising in industry and government. She serves as a consultant to the FCC on spectrum auctions and has previously consulted to a variety of government agencies including Dept. of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Dept. of Transportation, and the Commerce Department. Her industrial consulting has been in dynamic and real-time routing and scheduling, and in capital budgeting.

Paolo Toth is "Professor Emeritus" of “Operations Research” at DEI: (Department of Electrical and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi”, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, A.D. 1088), where he was Full Professor from 1983 to 2011. His research interests include Operations Research and Mathematical Programming methodologies and, in particular, the design and implementation of effective exact and heuristic algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Theory problems, and their application to real-world Transportation, Logistics, Loading, Routing, Crew Management, Railway Optimization problems. He is author of more than 190 papers published in international journals and of the book "Knapsack Problems: Algorithms and Computer Implementations" (coauthor S. Martello; J. Wiley, 1990). He is also Co-editor of the books "The Vehicle Routing Problem" (SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications, 2002) and "Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods and Applications” (MOS-SIAM Series on Optimization, 2014). He was President of EURO (Association of the European Operational Research Societies) for the period 1995-1996, and President of IFORS (International Federation of the Operational Research Societies) for the period 2001-2003. He acted as Chair of the Program Committee for the Triennial IFORS Conference in 1999. He received several international awards, among which: the "EURO Gold Medal" (the highest distinction within Operations Research in Europe) in 1998; the "Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science" (from INFORMS) in 2005; the "INFORMS Fellowship" in 2016; the “EURO Distinguished Service Award” in 2019; the "IFORS Fellowship" in 2020. In May 2003, the University of Montreal conferred him a "Doctorate honoris causa" in Operational Research. In October 2012, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting), he delivered the “IFORS Distinguished Plenary Lecture”; in July 2023, at the IFORS Triennial Conference, he delivered the “EURO Plenary Address”. He supervised more than 200 master theses, 25 PhD students from 6 different countries, and 16 Post-Docs.

Jayme Szwarcfiter is a Professor Emeritus at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Visiting Professor at Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in Brazil. His research interests are related to Graph Theory, Algorithms, Theory of Computation, and Discrete Mathematics. He has published more than 170 journal papers and several influential textbooks in these areas, and has supervised dozens of masters and doctoral students. Jayme is a Full Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and he has received numerous national and international awards such as the Grand Cross for Scientific Merit, the Almirante Álvaro Alberto prize, the Scientific Merit Prize awarded by the Brazilian Computer Society, and the Luis Federico Leloir prize, awarded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of Argentina. In addition, Jayme was a visiting professor in many countries like the US, England, Scotland, Argentina, Germany, France, Poland, Israel, Czech Republic, and Japan.

Margarida Carvalho has a bachelor and masters in mathematics. In 2016, she completed the PhD in computer science at the University of Porto (Portugal) for which she received the 2018 EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2017, she came to Montreal as an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at Polytechnique and never left since then. One year after, 2018, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, where now she holds the FRQ-IVADO Research Chair in Data Science for Combinatorial Game Theory. Margarida is an expert in mixed-integer programming, algorithmic game theory and computational complexity. She has papers in prestigious OR journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, and Mathematical Programming, as well as publications on the intersection of optimization, economics and machine learning in top conferences like EC, NeurIPS, and AAAI. Margarida is associate editor in INFORMS Journal on Computing, OR Spectrum and Dynamic Games and Applications.

Bruce Golden received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland Business School in 1976 and served as a Department Chairman from 1980 to 1996. Currently, he is the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research interests include heuristic search, combinatorial optimization, networks, and applied operations research. Bruce has received numerous awards, including the Thomas L. Saaty Prize (1994 and 2005), the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award (2000), the INFORMS Award for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice (2003), and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize (2005). He was named an INFORMS Fellow in 2004. Since 1999, Bruce has served as Editor-in-Chief of NETWORKS. Before that, he was Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. In addition, he has received numerous contracts and grants, has consulted for a wide variety of organizations, and has served on the Board of Directors of several high-tech companies based in Maryland. In 1980, he founded a management consulting company with several colleagues. The focus was on business logistics. Clients included IBM, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, Federal Express, Toyota, DuPont, and many others. In the late 1980’s, Bruce co-founded a second company, specializing in the design and sales of vehicle routing software. He and his partners successfully grew these companies and sold them in late 1998. The surviving company is RouteSmart Technologies, Inc. and it continues to thrive. Recent clients include the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx Ground, Australia Post, Swiss Post and many others. Bruce Golden was selected as the second VeRoLog Fellow (and first non-European) in July 2017. The VeRoLog Fellow title is awarded by the board of the European Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization to an individual who throughout his or her professional career has made fundamental and sustained contributions to vehicle routing and logistics optimization, and has influenced the field through his or her writings, teaching, service, and nurturing of younger professionals. In addition, in 2018 he was nominated and selected as a recipient of the George E. Kimball Medal for distinguished service to INFORMS and to the profession of operations research and management sciences. In 2019, Professor Golden received the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science & Logistics.

Dr. Achterberg studied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Berlin and the Zuse Institute Berlin. He finished his PhD in mathematics under supervision of Prof. Martin Grötschel in 2007. Dr. Achterberg is the author of SCIP, currently the best academic MIP solver. In addition to numerous publications in scientific journals he has also received several awards for his dissertation and for SCIP, such as the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize. From 2006, Dr. Achterberg worked for ILOG / IBM as developer of CPLEX in versions 11 to 12.6. Since 2014 he participates in the development of the Gurobi Optimizer, currently being the Vice President of R&D at Gurobi. In his spare time, Dr. Achterberg continues to work on the Gurobi MIP solver, because he is addicted to MIP. He does not have any interest in other things; his spouse, his three children, his two drum kits, and his attendances in the moshpits of punk rock concerts are just mock-ups to pretend having a normal life.

Francesca Maggioni is Associate Professor of Operations Research at the Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering (DIGIP) of the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests concern both methodological and applicative aspects of optimization under uncertainty. From a methodological point of view, she has developed different types of bounds and approximations for stochastic, robust and distributionally robust multistage optimization problems. She applies these methods to solve problems in logistics, transportation, energy production, pension funds and machine learning. On these topics she has published more than 60 scientific articles featured in peer-reviewed operations research and optimization journal like, among others, SIAM Journal on Optimization (SIOPT), European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Transportation Science, Journal of Optimization, Theory and Applications (JOTA). She is currently serving the “EURO Working Group on Stochastic Optimization” and the “AIRO Thematic Section of Stochastic Programming” as chair and has served the “Stochastic Programming Society” in the period 2016-2023. She is Associate Editor of the journals “Computational Management Science” (CMS), “EURO Journal on Computational Optimization” (EJCO), “An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research” (TOP), “Networks” and “International Transactions in Operational Research” (ITOR). She is principal investigator of the PRIN 2020 project "Urban Logistics and sustainable TRAnsportation: OPtimization under uncertainTY and MAchine Learning (ULTRAOPTYMAL) funded by the Italian University and Research Ministry.