SOLA Dissertation Award

The SOLA Dissertation Award recognizes outstanding Ph.D. dissertations related to the field of location analysis. The price is awarded biennially and announced during the INFORMS annual meetings.

The latest call for submissions is for the dissertations completed between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2017. You may find the eligibility criteria and application guidelines for the submission here: SOLA Dissertation Award Call

The next call for submissions will be for the dissertations completed between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2019.  The announcement for the call for submissions will be made in April 2020 with an anticipated application deadline of June 15, 2020.

(The award was formerly known as the UPS-SOLA Dissertation Award and SOLA-Air Products Dissertation Award.)

Award recipients

• 2020
  • Winner: Mercedes Pelegrín García, Universidad de Murcia
  • Runner-up: Gita Taherkhani, University of Waterloo
•  2018
  • Winners: Barış Yıldız, Bilkent University & Camilo Ortiz-Astorquiza, Concordia University
  • Runner-up: Kayse Lee Maass, University of Michigan
• 2016
  • Winners: Kien Trung Nguyen, Kaiserslautern University of Technology & Markus Sinnl, University of Vienna
  • Honorable mention: Fan Jia, University of Minnesota
• 2014
  • Winner: Gemma Berenguer, UC-Berkeley
  • Honorable mentions: Gina Galindo, SUNY-Buffalo & Hans-Peter Ziegler, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• 2012
  • Winner: Gisela Bardossy, University of Maryland
  • Honorable mention: Federico Liberatore, University of Kent
• 2009
  • Winner: Sebastian Velten, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • Finalists: Michael Lim, University of California, Berkeley & Ho-Yin Mak, University of California, Berkeley
• 2007
  • Winner: Boglarka Toth, University of Almeria
  • Finalists: Elrem Alper Murat, McGill University & Roger Lezhou Zhan, University of Florida
• 2005
  • Winner: Beryl Castello, Johns Hopkins University
  • Finalists: Qi Liu, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University & Leyla Ozsen, Northwestern University 
• 2003
  • Winner: Monica Gentili, Universita Di Roma
  • Finalists: Patricia Dominguez-Marin, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany & Lawrence Snyder, Northwestern University
• 2001
  • Winner: Bahar Yetis Kara, Bilkent University
• 1999
  • Winner: David R. Mazu, Johns Hopkins University
  • Second place: Susan Hesse Owen, Northwestern University
  • Third place: James W. George, Johns Hopkins University
• 1995
  • Winner: Ana Isabel Martins Botto de Barros, Erasmus Universiteit
• 1993
  • Winner: Russell D. Meller, University of Michigan
  • Second place: Shiv Kumar, Stanford University
  • Third place: Terri Anne Johnson, Clemson University
  • Honorable mention: John Cooper Fortney, University of Iowa
• 1992
  • Winner: Ingrid Bongartz, University of Waterloo
  • Second place: Karen Aardal, University Catholique de Louvain
  • Third place: Dilip Chhajed, Purdue University
• 1991
  • Winner: Fernando Mata, Ohio State University
  • Runner-ups: Eric Kosiba, Purdue University & Shuzhong Zhang, Erasmus University