Susanne Heipcke is Director of Software Engineering at FICO, where she has led the Modelling Team of FICO Xpress development for more than 12 years. Her team is responsible for the development and design of the modelling tools (Xpress Mosel) and the APIs of the Xpress Optimization software suite, with past tasks including the design of application development toolkits, solution templates, and productized optimization solutions such as FICO Decision Optimizer. More recently, her team’s responsibilities have expanded to include CI/CD, performance testing, and delivery infrastructure for the entire Xpress suite. Before joining Dash Optimization (acquired by FICO in 2008) in 1998, she worked for BASF-AG in Germany. Her Ph.D. research at the University of Buckingham—conducted partly at the MIT OR Center (USA) and the University Aix-Marseille II (France)—focused on solving large-scale industrial problems using a combination of constraint programming and mixed integer programming. Her work centers on all aspects of modelling, particularly through her contributions to the development of the algebraic modelling and programming language Xpress Mosel. She is the author of the book Applications of Optimization with Xpress-MP and numerous papers on different aspects of mathematical modelling. Susanne enjoys teaching mathematical optimization, having participated in teaching the mathematical modelling course in the OR master’s program at the University Aix-Marseille II (2001–2004) and the Computational Mixed-Integer Programming course at the Technical University of Munich in 2020. She regularly organizes specialist training events and conference sessions, such as the “Software for Optimization Modeling and Deployment” sessions at recent INFORMS Annual Meetings (jointly with Bob Fourer), and she is actively engaged in mentoring younger colleagues. Since 2019 she has been a member of the EURO Practitioners' Forum committee (formerly the EURO Working Group Practice of OR), leading the organization of the Forum’s annual meetings in 2020, 2023, and 2026. With more than 30 years of experience in applied OR, she has also contributed to numerous consulting projects worldwide, involving scheduling and planning in manufacturing, personnel staffing, aircraft routing with maintenance planning, portfolio optimization, trading, energy production planning and unit commitment, and retail logistics.Contents of this video: