El Mehdi Er Raqabi won the 2024 GERAD Best Thesis Competition for his thesis titled "Primal methods for very large-scale optimization". He was supervised by Issmail El Hallaoui and François Soumis from Polytechnique Montréal.

Congratulations!

It is with great sadness we announce that François Soumis passed away. Full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, he was a very active member of GERAD since its inception, was its Director from 1992 to 1996, and greatly contributed to its worldwide renown.

François was generous, hard-working and passionate about research. He lived this passion to the very end. He had a very positive impact on the GERAD and the Montreal Operations Research community. We will miss him greatly!

The funeral that will take place on February 28 and March 1st, 2025. You will find the details here.

At the 33rd EURO Conference in Copenhague, Danmark, the team of professors Issmail El Hallaoui and François Soumis won the prestigious EURO Excellence in Practice Award (EEPA) for their project "OCP Optimizes Its Supply Chain For Africa and The World". It is the fruit of a collaboration between Polytechnique Montréal/GERAD, OCP Group and UM6P University. This project is part of the Ph.D. research topic of El Mehdi Er Raqabi.

We should also underline the very important role of Ahmed Beljadid and Oussama Siwane in this project.