Ward Romeijnders appointed as Professor of Optimization under Uncertainty

The Faculty of Economics and Business is pleased to announce that Ward Romeijnders has been appointed as Professor of Optimization under Uncertainty. The chair is situated within the Department of Operations.

Ward Romeijnders has a long history at FEB, having also obtained his Research Master in Economics and Business (2011) and his PhD (2015) here. After obtaining is PhD degree (cum laude), he was an assistant professor at FEB and was promoted to associate professor in 2020. Romeijnders is an expert on stochastic programming and is broadly interested in theory, methods, and applications regarding optimization problems under uncertainty. In his research he deals with decision-making problems that arise when addressing societal challenges in, for example, energy, logistics, finance, and healthcare.

Romeijnders has received several research grants from NWO, the Dutch Research Council, for his research. The latest one for a project called "Discrete Decision Making under Uncertainty", in which he will lead a research team to investigate theory, algorithms, and applications of sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty involving integer decision variables. His research has also been published in various international journals, including Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, European Journal of Operational Research, and INFORMS Journal on Computing. Apart from his own research activities, Romeijnders is the Secretary of COSP, the governing board of the international Stochastic Programming Society, and he serves as Associate Editor of Mathematical Methods of Operations Research.

Optimization under uncertainty

The field of Optimization under Uncertainty considers practical decision-making problems in which decisions have to be made before key information is known. The chair is unique within the Faculty of Economics and Business and will contribute to the faculty’s interdisciplinary research theme Energy Transition and Climate Change. In his new role, Romeijnders will be a fellow at the FEB Research Institute and will participate in the research institute OPERA (Operations Management & Operations Research). He will also contribute to the innovation and development of the bachelor program BSc Econometrics and Operations Research, and the master program MSc Econometrics, Operations Research and Actuarial Studies.