Dr. Pirmin Fontaine received this year’s German Operations Research Society (GOR) dissertation award. Every year, at the GOR annual meeting, the German Operations Research Society gives awards for outstanding dissertations in the field of OR.

The dissertation was written under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Minner at the Chair of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at the Technical University of Munich. In his dissertation “Methodological Advances and New Formulations for Bilevel Network Design Problems”, Pirmin Fontaine introduced a new solution method for solving bilevel network design problems and discussed different applications in the area of transportation and traffic planning. Moreover, during a research stay at CIRRELT and in collaboration with Prof. Teodor Gabriel Crainic (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Prof. Michel Gendreau (École polytechnique de Montréal), the trade-off between risk minimization and risk equilibration in hazardous material shipment was analyzed by introducing a new formulation for assessing the risk of hazardous material accidents.

After finishing his Ph.D., Pirmin Fontaine spent one year as a postdoc at the CIRRELT and the Université du Québec à Montréal and worked together with Prof. Teodor Gabriel Crainic, Prof. Walter Rei, and Prof. Ola Jabali. He is now continuing his research at the Chair of Logistics and Supply Chain Management.