Dr. Christian Mandl received the German Operations Research Society (GOR) dissertation award 2020. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding dissertations in the field of Operations Research (OR). 

The dissertation entitled "Optimal Procurement and Inventory Control in Volatile Commodity Markets - Advances in Stochastic and Data-Driven Optimization”, 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 thesis, Christian Mandl presents machine learning-enabled optimization models for purchasing and inventory control of commodities under fluctuating market prices. Moreover, during a research stay at Cornell and in collaboration with Prof. Nagesh Gavirneni (Cornell University) and Prof. Selva Nadarajah (University of Illionois at Chicago), he studied optimal inventory management at warehouses of commodity-trading firms and how data-driven algorithms can support decision-making.