Maria Antónia Carravilla is a teacher at Universidade do Porto (U.Porto) since 1985 and a researcher at INESC-TEC since 1990. She has been also visiting professor at Universidade de São Paulo. She is the Director of the Doctoral Program in Engineering and Industrial Management since 2016.

Maria Antónia has been responsible for several R&D contracts with industry, services and public administration. These contracts resulted in decision support systems that proved to be very useful tools for these organizations, leading to long-lasting collaborations with FEUP.

The applications of combinatorial optimization are related with Nesting Problems, Lot-Sizing, Staff Scheduling, Retail Shelf Planning, Supply Chain Management, Fleet Management, Pricing, etc. Methodologically the emphasis has been on optimization, namely through mathematical programming and constraints programming models and their hybridization with heuristics methods.

Maria Antónia received twice the award for best paper published in the previous two years by members of APDIO and as a result of the work developed in Retail Shelf Planning, our team was a finalist of the “Wagner Prize”, awarded by INFORMS.

As a teacher at U.Porto, she has been responsible for several courses related with Operations Research, Operations Management and Logistics that were taught at the BSc, MSc and PhD levels. She has supervised several PhD and MSc students whose theses were developed in academia as well as in industry.

Maria Antónia received in 2009, the first time it has been awarded, the Award for Pedagogical Excellence that aims to award the best teacher for the past 5 years.