News

Past ORL PhD student Marjolein Buisman nominated for Beta PhD Award 2021

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December 2, 2021
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During the Beta Symposium on November 25, Marjolein Buisman, who did her PhD research in our group, was one of the 4 nominees for the annual Beta PhD Prize. Marjolein’s thesis was called ’Reduce and re-use: Studying retailers’ food waste from an Operations Research Perspective', and was supervised by dr. Rene Haijema and prof. Jacqueline Bloemhof. Marjolein defended her thesis in Wageningen in September 2019, and is now an Assistant Professor in Retail Analytics at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany, where she continues to work on research related to retail operations and sustainability.

Other nominees were PhD graduates from Eindhoven University of Technology, KU Leuven, and VU Amsterdam. The jury, consisting of Beta fellows Henk Zijm (University of Twente), Jan Karel Lenstra (CWI), and Marc Salomon (University of Amsterdam), was very pleased with the quality of all nominees. “The four dissertations cover problems in inventory control, project planning, sustainability, and vehicle routing, and apply methods from optimization, local search, applied probability, Markov decision processes, and machine learning. Central and relevant problems in operations management and logistics, solved by advanced and effective mathematics.” The jury finally selected Maaike Hoogeboom from VU Amsterdam as the winner for her work on optimising routes with service time window constrains. We congratulate Maaike with her winning thesis, as well as Marjolein and the other nominees with their nominations!

Information about the Beta PhD Prize

The Beta PhD prize 2021is awarded to the best PhD thesis submitted during 2019 and 2020 at universities participating in Beta. Selection criteria for the best Beta PhD thesis are (1) scientific quality, (2) (scientific) originality, (3) quality of presentation, (4) scientific relevance, and (5) societal relevance. The winner received a certificate, a Beta PhD Award plaque, as well as a cash prize of € 500.

Information about Beta

The Beta Research School for Operations Management and Logistics is a research school in which several scientific disciplines contribute to a deeper understanding of the performance of operational processes. It has a multidisciplinary focus on the analysis, design and control of operational processes. Beta intends to build on its strengths in order to foster its position as the network for Operations Management and Logistics in The Netherlands and Flanders. Beta is also an important provider of PhD courses in the field of Operations Management and Logistics within the national Graduate Program Operations Management and Logistics. Next to the ORL group at Wageningen University, related research groups from KU Leuven, VU Amsterdam, Maastricht University, University of Twente, CWI, University of Hasselt, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tilburg University, and the University of Ghent participate in Beta.