It is my pleasure to announce that the winner of this year's Harold Hotelling Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment is Dr. Yves Smeers of the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. Congratulations to Dr. Smeers! For more information about Dr. Smeers and his work that is being recognized with the Hotelling Medal, please see the award citation and description below.
For those of you who plan to attend the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October, we will recognize Dr. Smeers as the Hotelling Medal winner at our ENRE section business meeting, and Dr. Smeers will deliver his Hotelling Medal lecture in a dedicated ENRE session at the conference. We hope that you will attend these special ENRE events and we will send out more information about them as the conference approaches.
Lastly, I want to thank this year's Hotelling Medal selection committee for their efforts to run the competition and select a winner: Shmuel Oren (chair), Andres Weintraub, Hung-po Chao, Ramteen Sioshansi, and Golbon Zakeri.
Yves Smeers Hotelling Medal Citation: For fundamental theoretical contributions and development of mathematical programming methods for energy risk management, economic analysis of energy markets, and formation of energy policy in the gas and electricity markets
More Information: Professor Smeers is an emeritus professor at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, where he has served as a faculty member since 1972. At CORE, he contributed to developing a worldclass energy research program by leveraging the strengths of CORE in the areas of mathematical programming and economics to push boundaries and marrying these disciplines in applications in the electricity and gas sectors. Professor Smeers engaged and had lasting policy impact on the multinational energy firm GDF Suez (subsequently ENGIE) and the European Commission, as well as many other industry stakeholders.
The footprint of Professor Smeers on the application of mathematical programming in the energy sector is impressive in both breadth and depth, and often tied to significant impact on applications: (i) development of mathematical programming methods for large-scale optimization, with indicative applications in uncertainty management and complementarity problems in energy sector equilibrium models, (ii) development of fundamental theory for risk management and markets for trading risk in the energy sector, (iii) concrete proposals for aligning European electricity market design with economic first, with far-reaching implications on network pricing in European electricity markets.
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Dr. Benjamin D. Leibowicz
President, INFORMS ENRE
Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
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