Portrait of Bernard Fortz
New 2023 Lecturers Honoured
Professor in Optimization Methods in Management.
Could you briefly describe your background, your research topics and your conception of university teaching?
My academic training began with a degree in mathematics from UNamur (1993), followed by a PhD in operations research from ULB in 1998. After post-doctoral stays at AT&T Labs-Research (USA) and Maastricht University, I was a lecturer at the Institute of Administration and Management at UCLouvain from 2000 to 2006. Since 2006, I have been a professor at ULB and head of the "Graphs and Mathematical Optimization" team, before joining ULiège in September 2023 as a professor of optimization methods in management at HEC-Liège.
My main areas of research include combinatorial optimization, telecommunication networks, energy and two-level optimization. I am associate editor for several scientific journals and coordinator for the EURO working group on network optimization. I was also coordinator from 2012 to 2017 of a Belgian government-funded research project (PAI) on combinatorial optimization. I'm also "Information Technologies Manager" for EURO, the association of European operational research societies, and am president-elect of ORBEL, the Belgian operational research society.
My teaching at HEC Liège covers mathematics courses for second-year management engineers and advanced optimization methods in master's courses and a doctoral seminar. Given this background, I'm keen to pass on the usefulness of mathematics to management students, highlighting the applications of the theories studied, and their link with developments in today's ubiquitous computer science. With a strong commitment to the link between research and teaching, I teach an advanced optimization course aimed at helping students solve real-life problems, using high-performance tools derived from the flourishing optimization research of recent years.
