Andreea Avramescu, PhD student in Decision Sciences at the Alliance Manchester Business School has been awarded a prestigious SPECIES Scholarship award.
The SPECIES Scholarship is offered by the SPECIES Society which aims to “promote evolutionary algorithmic thinking within Europe and wider, and more generally to promote inspiration of parallel algorithms derived from natural processes.” The scholarship enables winners to spend 3 months at another one of the candidate host institutions, to carry out research, which is all fully funded as part of the scholarship. Andreea has chosen to undertake her research placement at the University of Malaga and her project examines the complex optimisation problems involved in the optimal design of supply chains.
Andreea’s placement is with the Networking and Emerging Optimization Research group (NEO Research) in the Department of Computer Science and Programming Languages, University of Malaga. For this placement, Andreea is being supervised by Dr. Manuel López-Ibáñez, who is a Senior Distinguished Researcher at The University of Malaga and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Decision Sciences and Business Analytics at the Alliance Manchester Business School.
Andreea’s research expertise lies at the intersection between data science and decision sciences. She expands: “I am particularly interested in optimisation problems addressing social sustainability issues in the fields of logistics, supply chain management, and applied optimisation. I have previously worked on topics related to international migration, social media data, sentiment analysis, cryptomarkets, drug consumption, and illegal supply chains in both industry and academia.”
Her placement research starts with the existing idea that combining automatic configurations tools with flexible algorithmic frameworks can produce new algorithmic designs that outperform those proposed in the literature. Her project seeks to apply this idea to the design of high-performance algorithms for tackling the optimisation of supply chains. She explained: “More specifically, I work on the automatic design of multi-objective algorithms for the optimisation of supply chains, which aligns directly with the topic of my PhD on the optimization of personalised medicine development and delivery.”
Her PhD research, under the supervision of Alliance MBS’s Dr Richard Allmendinger, draws on tools from operations research and machine learning to guide the optimisation of the manufacturing tasks and delivery strategies of personalised medical products. She is also currently an Enrichment Student at the Alan Turing Institute.
