This award is given annually to the best paper dealing with energy, environmental, or natural resource issues by a student author who is presenting at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, as judged by a panel of the Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment Section. Award finalists will present their submitted papers in the award session at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.
Nomination and deadlines
All students (undergraduate, MS, PhD) conducting research related to energy, environment, or natural resource issues (including theory, OR/MS methods, or applications) are encouraged to apply. Students do not need to be ENRE members to be eligible for the competition, however membership is encouraged. Publication of the paper is not a requirement. The submitted papers will be reviewed by a panel of judges and the Student Best Paper Award Committee of ENRE. The award includes an official certificate from INFORMS and a $400 honorarium.
Eligibility criteria:
· Student must be currently enrolled in a graduate/undergraduate program of a university.
· Student must be the first author and main contributor of the paper, although faculty members or other mentors can be co-authors.
· Student must be presenting a talk at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting.
· Student must not have received a previous ENRE Student Best Paper Award.
Submission process:
We encourage ENRE members to submit their paper or nominate papers written by others.
The paper must be submitted to the Committee Chair: Elina Spyrou (evangelia.spyrou@imperial.ac.uk), Imperial College London, by June 23, 2025.
The submission should be done via email and must include:
1. An electronic version of the paper [formatting requirements: 30 pages or less, double-spaced, with 11-point font and 1-inch margins all around].
2. A letter from the mentor/supervisor/faculty co-author highlighting the contributions of the student to the paper.
2025 Student Best Paper
Winner: Shuyi Chen, Shixiang Zhu and Ramteen Sioshansi
Publication: "Adaptive Robust Optimization with Data-Driven Uncertainty for Enhancing Distribution System Resilience".
Award committee: Elina Spyrou (chair), Bolun Xu, Enzo Sauma, Yonghong Chen
2024 Student Best Paper
Winner: Felipe Cordera, Rodrigo Moreno and Fernando Ordoñez
Publication: "Unit Commitment Problem with Energy Storage Under Correlated Renewables Uncertainty".
Award committee: Sabah Bushaj, Gokce Palak, Wake Forest U., Sevilay Onal, U. of Illinois Springfield,Bo Shen, New Jersey Institute of Technology
2023 Student Best Paper
Winner: Heraldo Rozas
Publication: "Condition-based maintenance for wind farms using distributionally robust chance constrained program".
Award committee: Frauke Liers (chair), Hanane Dagdougui, Roger Z. Ríos-Mercado, Antonio Frangioni, Lars Schewe.
2022 Student Best Paper
Winner: Dirk Lauinger
Award committee: Feng Qiu (chair), Yury Dvorkin, Sonja Wogrin, Yiling Zhang, Ying Zhang, Chaoyue Zhao.
2019 Student Best Paper
Winner: Jacob Mays (student), David Morton and Richard O’Neill
Manuscript: "Asymmetric Risk and Fuel Neutrality in Capacity Markets ".
2018 Student Best Paper
Winner: Beste Basciftci, Student at H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Manuscript: "Stochastic optimization of maintenance and operations schedules under unexpected failures". IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 33(6), 6755 - 6765, 2018.
Committee Chair: Boris Defourny, Lehigh University
Winners from previous years
Click here for a full list of past recipients of the Student Best Paper Award...