Operations Research
New Paradigms and Emerging Applications

Vilda Purutçuoglu is the professor in the Department of Statistics at Middle East Technical University (METU) and also affiliated faculty in the Informatics Institute, Institute of Applied Mathematics and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at METU. She has completed her BSc and MSc in statistics and minor degree in economics in 2002 and 2004, respectively. She received her doctorate at the Lancaster University in 2007. Then, she graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Anadolu University in 2020. Since 2020, she has been associate editor of Biometrics Journal and since 2018, she has been editorial board member of International Journal of Industrial Engineering and Operational Research and since 2010, she has been advisory board member of the Journal of Biostatistics-Turkish Clinics. Purutçuoglu was awarded from the academic staff evaluation in the Faculty of Art and Science at METU between 2011 and 2021. In 2015, she was elected the finalist of Sabri Ülker Science Award supported by the Sabri Ülker Food Research Foundation. Purutçuoglu has been the elected twice as the Award Fund Committee Member of the International Biometrics Society between 2016-2019 and 2019-2022 and will be selected as the chair of this committee from January 2022 for one year. She has been also the country representative of Turkey in Eastern Mediterranean Region of the International Biometrics since 2019. Purutçuoglu’s current researches are in the field of bioinformatics, systems biology, and neuroscience. Besides journal articles, she has written a book, Statistics for Bioinformatics (in Turkish), about the use of major statistical techniques in the analysis of biological data. Moreover, she is currently working on a monograph on statistical modelling and inference of different biological data types.

Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber is a Professor at Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland, at Faculty of Engineering Management, in the Chair of Marketing and Economic Engineering. His research is on mathematics, operational research), finance, economics, optimization and control, neuro-, bio- and earth-sciences, medicine, data mining, analytics, artificial intelligence, education and development; he is involved in the organization of scientific life internationally. He received Diploma and Doctorate in Mathematics, and Economics / Business Administration, at RWTH Aachen, and Habilitation at TU Darmstadt (Germany). He replaced Professorships at University of Cologne, and TU Chemnitz, Germany. At Institute of Applied Mathematics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, he was a Professor in the programs of Financial Mathematics and Scientific Computing, and Assistant to the Director, and has been a member of five further graduate schools, institutes and departments of METU. G.-W. Weber has different affiliations at Universities of Siegen (Germany), Federation University (Ballarat, Australia), University of Aveiro (Portugal), University of North Sumatra (Medan, Indonesia), Malaysia University of Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and KTO Karatay University (Lean & Green SCM Lab; Konya, Turkey), at EURO (Association of European OR Societies) where he is "Advisor to EURO Conferences" and IFORS (International Federation of OR Societies), where he is member in many national OR societies and working groups, at POP (Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group), etc. G.-W. Weber has supervised and co-supervised many MSc. and PhD. students, authored and coauthored numerous books, special issues and articles, and given many presentations from a great diversity of subject areas, on theory, methods and practice. He has been a member of many international editorial boards and award boards; he participated at and was in charge of numerous research projects; G.-W. Weber received various recognitions and awards by students, universities, conferences and scientific organizations, nationally and internationally.

Hajar Farnoudkia studied her bachelor and master’s on statistics in University of Tabriz. After graduation in 2010, she started to work as a personnel master in a Turkish factory settled in Iran. In 2015, she was accepted as a Ph.D student from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey working in two TUBITAK projects and could finish her education in five years. Immediately, she was hired as an assistant professor in Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of Baskent University. She has some SCI publications and book chapters based on statistical methods in biological network and signal data.