Women in Science (WiS) event

It is the Organization Committee honor to invite you to attend to the 1^st Women in Science (WiS) event that will be held on Monday the 9^th of July in the EURO Conference. Our main goal is to highlight the role of WiS throughout history. The event will consist of a round table with four women who work in the fields of Science and Technology. They will share their experiences and debate the role of women as scientist researchers.

In addition, there will be a photography exhibition kindly provided by David Ibáñez Gil de Ramales and Nuria Carrasco Vela, President and Secretary respectively of the Asociación de Tecnología y Ciencia de Bétera (ASSTEC). The exhibition will share stories of prominent women in Science and Technology throughout history.

The WiS event will be held on Monday the 9^th of July from 17:45 to 19:00, after the plenary session scheduled for that day of the conference.

17:45 – 18:00. Introduction by Dr. Lucía Medea-García López and Dr. Ana López Navajas. University of Lisbon and Universitat de València.

18:00 –18:45. Round table: the role of Women in Science and Technology: past, present and future.

• Cynthia Barnhart. MIT’s Chancellor and the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering.
• Elena Fernández. Full Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
• Nuria Oliver. Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone.
• M. Grazia Speranza. Deputy Rector and Full Professor at the University of Brescia. President-elect of IFORS.

18:45—19:00. Questions.

The round table will be moderated by Dr. Lucía Medea-García López. Reservation in advanced will be necessary through the EURO Conference website.

Looking forward to seeing you in the WiS event.

Organization Committee of the EURO Conference.

The WiS event is sponsored by:

Cynthia Barnhart is MIT’s Chancellor and the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering. She previously served as Associate and Acting Dean for the School of Engineering and co-directed the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT.  Her research focuses on building mathematical programming models and large-scale optimization approaches for transportation and logistics systems.  Barnhart is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as the President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences and in editorial roles for the flagship journals in her discipline.

Dr. Elena Fernández is Full Professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya- BcnTech (UPC) in Barcelona (Spain), since 2007. In 1988 she obtained her Ph.D. in Operations Research at UPC. She has held several faculty positions, first at the Basque Country University and then at UPC. Dr. Fernández’s research interest focuses on discrete optimization, mainly in discrete location, network design and vehicle routing. Elena has been the principal investigator of several of research projects and has supervised a number of doctoral theses. She is the author of over 70 scientific papers, published in highly reputed journals, with about 40 co-authors from a dozen of different countries. Elena has been associate editor of TOP, the Operations Research Journal of the Spanish Society SEIO, and belongs to the editorial board of Computers & Operations Research and of the recently created EURO Journal on Computation Optimization.

Dr. Ana López-Navajas is a researcher linked to the University of Valencia and currently works as a consultant on co-education at the Valencian Government. She obtained a PhD from the University of Valencia and she previously worked as a Language and Literature teacher. She has been the coordinator of the TRACE project “Women in the contents of the Compulsory Secondary Education”, that has analysed the presence of women and men in textbooks and its implications (mujeresenlaeso.uv.es). From 2008 to 2016 she coordinated a work group on educational innovation, “The visibility of women in the E.S.O. (compulsory education)”, that brings together secondary school and university teachers in order to develop educational material that includes the absent women in the school contents. She is currently working on the development of another open-access database that provides educational material and indications for high-school teachers and publishing houses. She was awarded in 2016 with the “Ascensión Xirivella” prize, and with the “Avanzadoras” award in 2017, given by Intermon-Oxfam in association with the newspaper “20 minutos”. Her research has provided the basis for the approval of a motion by the Spanish Parliament in order to include women’s contributions in the academic contents. Her work has also triggered the development of the Co-education Master Plan adopted by the Valencian Government, a Plan that affects to all levels of education.

Dr. Lucía Medea-García has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Linguistics by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently teaching at the University of Lisbon, and she is also working as a Language Architect, coordinating a group of linguists for the development and improvement of the Microsoft Word grammar and style checker for Arabic. She has previously worked as a consultant for the United Nations University (Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility) and as an encoder and transcriber for the Real Academia Española. She is also in charge of the adaptation to Arabic of the “Dytective Test” (Change Dyslexia), for the early detection of dyslexia.
She has collaborated, since its creation, in the TRACE project “Women in the contents of the Compulsory Secondary Education” as well as in the work group “The visibility of women in the E.S.O. (compulsory education)”. Within these projects, her areas of research have mainly been Language and Literature, although she has occasionally participated in other fields such as Music or Sciences.

Dr. Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist and the Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone. She holds a Ph.D. from the Media Lab at MIT. She is the first female computer scientist in Spain to be named an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an ACM Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence and a IEEE Fellow. She is well known for her work in computational models of human behavior, human computer-interaction, intelligent user interfaces, mobile computing and big data for social good. She is the co-inventor of 40 patents. She is a frequent keynote speaker both for technical and non-technical audiences. She is very passionate about the power of technology to improve our quality of life, both individually and collectively. She invests significant effort in outreach efforts to make technology more accessible to the general public.

Dr. M. Grazia Speranza received a degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics in 1980 and 1983, respectively, from the University of Milan. Since 1994, she has been a Full Professor of operations research at the University of Brescia. She was the President of the Research Council (1998–2000) and Vice-President of the University of Brescia (2000–2002), and the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business (2002–2008). She was President of EURO (Association of European Operational Research Societies) in 2011-12 and of TSL (Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS) in 2014. Now, she is Deputy Rector at the University of Brescia and President-elect of IFORS. Her main scientific interests are optimization models and algorithms for transportation and logistics. Other scientific interests include scheduling, combinatorial optimization, and optimization models in finance. She has published more than 150 papers on these topics in international journals and volumes. She has also edited international volumes and special issues of journals.