Ashish Nemani (2005 - Current)

Ashish completed his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in industrial engineering in 2005. His inclination towards solving the practical problems in optimization from his undergraduate level enticed him to pursue PhD in Operations Research. He is currently working on the intermodal load planning problem, mainly at the railway terminal. The goal of this project is to develop an efficient model to improve the loading patterns of containers and trailers on the intermodal trains. He enjoys reading novels and can also be a poet in his high moments. After finishing his studies he plans to join industry.

Bala Vaidyanathan (2003 -2007)

Bala completed his undergraduate studies at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002. His interest in mathematics andte about sports in general and tennis in particular. He also likes music on two extreme ends of the spectrum: heavy metal and classica solving real-life problems in Operations Research made him enroll in the Ph.D. program at our university in 2003. His research focused in the field of network optimization on two real-life problems related to locomotive and crew scheduling for US railroads. He won the award of Honorable Mention in INFORMS paper competition on Management Science in Railroad Applications in 2004 and 2006. His paper on "Multi-Commodity Network Flow Based Approaches for the Railroad Crew Scheduling Problem" won him the best paper award in the Annual Graduate Student Paper Contest by Transportation Research Forum in 2007. He is passionate about sports in general and tennis in particular. He also likes music on two extreme ends of the spectrum: heavy metal and classical.
After graduation, He joined FedEX.

Guvenc Sahin (2002 - 2006)

Guvenc has obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey in July 2000 and July 2002, respectively. His main area of research is Operations Research, and topics of special interest are mathematical modeling, integer programming, logistics network design and facility location. He focused on hierarchical facility location problems during his M.S. study. In this Ph.D. study, he did research on multi-commodity flow network design problems, train dispatching problems, and yard operations. He also taught courses on Decision Support Systems to graduate and undergraduate students. He is a member of INFORMS, IIE, and Operational Research Society-Turkey (ORST).
After graduation, he joined the faculty of Industrial Engineering at Sabanci University, Turkey.

Arvind Kumar (2001 - 2005)

Arvind completed his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in chemical engineering. Owing to his fascination for mathematical modeling, and their applications to real-life problems, he chose to pursue his doctoral studies in Industrial Engineering at University of Florida. His research focused on the development of linear programming approaches for radiation therapy treatment planning problems. He developed very efficient algorithms to solve these problems which will reduce the current patient treatment time significantly while simultaneously improving the treatment quality. At the 2003 INFORMS Annual Meeting, his co-authored paper, "A column generation approach to radiation therapy treatment planning using aperture modulation," won the prestigious Pierskalla Award given to the best paper in Health Applications.
After graduating in 2005, Arvind joined Innovative Scheduling, Inc., as the Director of Research and Development. He is a key member of the team developing the train scheduling decision support system. He is also the Lead Development Manager for other software products on meet-pass planning and hump yard management.

Krishna C. Jha (2000 - 2004)

Krishna completed his B.S. degree in Mechanical engineering at Bihar Institute of Technology, India and M.S. in Industrial engineering at Indian institute of technology, Kanpur. During his doctoral studies at University of Florida, he developed innovative very large-scale neighborhood search algorithms for several large scale optimization problems arising in facility planning, defense, and railroad scheduling. His research on the Block-to-Train Assignment Problem won him the First Prize in 2003 INFORMS paper competition on Management Science in Railroad Applications.
Krishna graduated in 2004 and joined Innovative Scheduling, Inc., where he is the Director of Research and Development. He is the key architect in building decision support systems for train scheduling and railroad crew scheduling.

Jian Liu (1999 - 2003)

Jian Liu obtained his B.S. degree in Automation in Tsinghua University in Beijing and M.S. degree in Electrical engineering from National university of Singapore. His research is focused in development efficient and pragmatic optimization techniques for large-scale transportation scheduling problems. He obtained his PhD degree in industrial engineering at University of Florida. He conducted cutting-edge research on developing novel very large-scale neighborhood search (VLSN) techniques for airline fleet scheduling problems, developed another VLSN search algorithm for the railroad blocking problem that has being widely used in the railroad industry, and also developed an elegant decomposition algorithm to solve the locomotive planning problem. His research on locomotive scheduling won him the First Prize in the 2002 INFORMS paper competition on Management Science in Railroad Applications, and Honorable Mention for his research on railroad blocking in 2003.
Currently, he is working at Norfolk Southern Corporation.