Since September 2016, Marilène Cherkesly has been an assistant professor of operational management with the Department of Management and Technology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She first received a B.A. in business administration, with a concentration in operational management and logistics, from HEC Montréal in 2011. She then obtained her PhD in applied mathematics from Polytechnique Montréal in 2015, under the supervision of Professors Guy Desaulniers and Gilbert Laporte. During her university career, she received the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Quebec Lieutenant Governor’s Youth Medal in 2015. After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral trainee affiliated with UQAM’s School of Management Science, with the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University and with the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT). During that time, she received an NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship.

Her research interests are focused on developing methods based on operational research to optimize real, complex transportation and logistics systems. For her PhD, she worked on the development of branch-price-and-cut and metaheuristic algorithms for parcel handling problems in road transport, to improve worker safety. During her postdoctorate, she worked on the mathematical modelling and resolution of a logistics network design problem in Liberia, in partnership with a local organization there. More recently, she has developed expertise in integrating localization and transport problems, both in general contexts and in the area of humanitarian logistics. Her ongoing projects touch on the following: designing healthcare networks in hard-to-access areas, designing routes for mobile clinics in war zones, and integrating real, complex constraints (e.g. handling, coverage, localization) into vehicle routing problems. There are two aspects of research that inspire her: the real problems arising from humanitarian logistics and the development of efficient intelligent algorithms for logistics and transportation problems. She wants to continue collaborating on humanitarian logistics and merchandise transport problems in conjunction with real-world applications and with academia.

Member of GERAD since September 2017