GERAD is truly one of a kind, and I’m very proud to be one of its regular members as of fall 2018. I’ve been involved here since 2012 and I hope to continue collaborating with the research centre’s members for many years to come. I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Automated Production Engineering from the École de Technologie Supérieure in 2010, and then worked for two years as a junior engineer automating industrial production lines, a period that allowed me to consolidate my knowledge. In 2012, I registered at Polytechnique Montréal to do a Master’s in Applied Mathematics, under the supervision of Charles Audet, professor at Polytechnique and a regular GERAD member, and Pascal Côté, industrial researcher at Rio Tinto and associate GERAD member. The field of hydroelectric production appealed to me greatly, so I decided to pursue my studies, obtaining a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Polytechnique in 2016. After my PhD, I did postdoctoral work at Université Laval, and since August 2017, I have been an associate professor with the Department of Computers and Mathematics at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC).

My thesis research dealt with optimizing hydroelectric production in a real application setting. I developed an innovative model for the short-term hydroelectric optimization problem, and then I worked on generating input-scenario trees and developed a multi-stage stochastic model for the short-term problem. Finally, I incorporated these models into a black-box optimization setting to optimize the parameters of the input-scenario trees. I am continuing my work on hydroelectric production optimization, notably through my NSERC Discovery Grant and through a MITACS grant obtained in partnership with Miguel F. Anjos, Dominique Orban, Guy Desaulniers and Pascal Côté at Rio Tinto. We currently have two doctoral students working on the project, and two other students will join the project this winter. Our goal is to develop new methodologies to solve the short-term stochastic model, to integrate turbine maintenance into the model and to develop new formulations for the short-term optimization model.

My expertise allows me to deal with several types of problems (linear, nonlinear, integer, stochastic) and I am very interested in formulating and solving optimization problems in real settings. For instance, I recently worked on projects with Enfant-Jésus Hospital, which is part of the CHU de Québec–Université Laval hospital complex. One of these projects aimed to improve the schedules of employees in one specific area, and the second was about predicting the need for hospital beds in the surgery unit of the new Enfant-Jésus Hospital. Optimization can be helpful in a number of areas, especially when used innovatively to solve problems differently.

Member of GERAD since September 2018