The 6th IMA–OR Society Conference on Management Mathematics

Professor Christina Pagel

Professor of Operational Research, UCL

Professor of Operational Research at University College London, using mathematical tools to support delivery of health services. Her work has included developing and communicating methods for tracking outcomes of congenital heart disease; improving services in paediatric and adult intensive care; and the resilience of UK scientific institutions.

She is co-lead of the UCL SPROCKET hub (2026-2030) aiming to improve services for children with complex health needs.

She is President Elect of the UK Operational Research Society (presidential term 2027-28) and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Dr Dries Goossens

Doctor of Applied Economics , Professor, Ghent University

An Associate Professor at Ghent University (Belgium), where he is affiliated with the Department of Business Informatics and Operations Management within the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. He obtained his PhD from KU Leuven, where his doctoral research focused on combinatorial auctions. Since then, his research has expanded to encompass sports scheduling and other timetabling problems.

Dries Goossens serves as Coordinator of the EURO Working Group on Operations Research in Sports (OR in Sports) and of MathSport International, reflecting his active leadership within the international sports analytics and operations research community. He also serves as Associate Editor for leading academic journals in optimization and teaching.

Over the years, he has collaborated extensively with sports organizations to design fair, balanced, and efficient competition schedules across various professional, amateur and youth sports. Since 2006, he has been responsible for computing the official fixture schedule of the Belgian Pro League, one of the longest-running collaborations between academia and professional sports scheduling.

Professor Enza Messina

Full Professor of Operations Research, University of Milan-Bicocca

Full Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she leads the MIND (Models in Decision Making and Data Analysis) research laboratory. Her research sits at the intersection of optimization under uncertainty and machine learning, with a particular focus on stochastic programming, probabilistic modeling, and the integration of learning-based methods with decision models. She has led and participated in several national and international research projects applying these methods to problems in sustainable urban logistics, energy planning, healthcare, e-justice and natural language processing. More recently, she has explored the use of neural network surrogates for stochastic programs and generative AI for scenario generation.