Adam Letchford is Professor of Operational Research (OR) in the Department of Management Science at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He has published over 100 refereed journal articles, and over 15 book chapters. He has also served on the editorial boards of seven international journals, including Mathematical Programming, Mathematical Programming Computation, and Operations Research. He concentrates mainly on integer programming and combinatorial optimisation, but also has some interest in global optimisation. He is interested in applications of optimisation not only in OR, but also in statistics, computer science, engineering and the physical sciences. He is known especially for his work on cutting planes and their application to vehicle routing and facility location problems.
Title: Some Thoughts on Duality in Continuous and Discrete Optimisation.

Boglárka G-Tóth is a senior research fellow at the Department of Computer Optimization, University of Szeged.  She received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Almería, Spain. Her research focuses on global optimization with reliable methods, addressing continuous and mixed-integer nonlinear problems on simplices and networks, with applications in location analysis. From 2018 to 2023, she was a board member of the European Working Group of Location Analysis (EWGLA). She has been vice president of the Hungarian Society of Operations Research (HORS) from 2020 to 2023 and its president since 2023. Additionally, she has been secretary of the Operations Research Committee of Section III of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2021 and a member of the Young Academy of Hungary since 2022. She serves on the editorial boards of the Central European Journal of Operations Research and Applied Mathematical Letters, and is the managing editor of Acta Cybernetica. She has guest edited special issues of the Journal of Global Optimization and Mathematical Programming B. Her awards include the Farkas Gyula Memorial Prize of the Bolyai János Mathematical Society (2007), the UPS-SOLA Dissertation Award of INFORMS' Section on Location Analysis (2007). She was a finalist for the EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award (2009), the Bolyai Fellowship (2009-2012), the NATE Women in Science Excellence Award (2017), the Rapcsák Tamás Prize (2018), and the Scientific Award of the Faculty of Science and Informatics, University of Szeged (2022).
Title: Advanced Hybrid Quantum Optimization Frameworks.

Claudia Archetti is Associate Professor of Operations Research at University of Brescia. From September 2021 to September 2024, she was Full Professor in Operations Research at ESSEC Business School in Paris. The main areas of the scientific activity are: models and algorithms for vehicle routing problems; mixed integer mathematical programming models for the minimization of the sum of inventory and transportation costs in logistic networks; exact and heuristic algorithms for supply-chain management; reoptimization of combinatorial optimization problems. She is author of more than 100 papers in international journals. She is co-Editor in Chief of Networks. She was VIP3 of EURO, the Association of European Operational Research Societies, in charge of publications and communication.
Title: Exact approaches for colorful components problems based on representative formulations.

Dick den Hertog is a professor of Operations Research at University of Amsterdam. His research interests cover various fields in prescriptive analytics, in particular linear and nonlinear optimization. In recent years, his main focus has been on robust optimization, and recently he started research on Optimization with Machine Learning. He is also active in applying the theory in real-life applications. In particular, he is interested in applications that contribute to a better society. He received the INFORMS Franz Edelman Award twice: in 2013 for his research on optimal flood protection, and in 2021 for his research on optimizing the food supply chain for the UN World Food Programme. He has been Visiting Professor at MIT for several years now. He is Science-to-Impact Director of the Analytics for a Better World Institute, that he co-founded in 2022.
Title: Optimization for a Better World.

Gabriele Eichfelder is a full Professor of Mathematical Methods of Operations Research at the Institute of Mathematics, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. She received her doctoral degree in 2006 and completed her Habilitation in Applied Mathematics at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 2012. Her research interests lie in mathematical optimization, with a particular focus on nonlinear and global optimization, vector-valued and set-valued optimization, and numerical methods for challenging optimization problems arising in applications. She has authored two Springer research monographs, published widely in leading international journals, and received several publication awards. She served as Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization from 2023 to 2025 and is a co-organizer of the SIAM Conference on Optimization 2026 in Edinburgh. She is active in the international optimization community through program committees and editorial boards, including as Area Editor of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. In 2024, she was elected EUROPT Fellow.
Title: Beyond a Single Optimum: Trade-offs and Insights in Multiobjective Optimization.

Tom Van Woensel is a Full Professor of Freight Transport and Logistics at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He develops models for transport, logistics, and mobility problems using operations research techniques, building an academic foundation in supply chains, transport, logistics, and mobility. His research primarily focuses on freight transport and logistics, where he has made significant contributions throughout his career. Van Woensel has authored over 150 papers in academic journals, including Transportation Science, Management Science, and Transportation Research Part B. His work has received close to 14,000 citations and an h-index of 63, as recorded on Google Scholar. As a collaborating member, he is connected to CIRRELT (Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les réseaux d'entreprise, la logistique et le transport) in Montreal, Canada. Additionally, Van Woensel directs the European Supply Chain Forum (ESCF), which involves around 75 multinational companies, facilitating interaction and knowledge sharing within supply chains.
Title: Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problems: A short review, some models and directions for future research.