Research

Publication

• Optimizing the Path Towards Plastic-Free Oceans Preprint Media Website
  Operations Research, 2025
  With Dick den Hertog, Jean Pauphilet, Bruno Sainte-Rose and Yannick Pham

  • Runner-Up, MSOM Society Award for Responsible Research in Operations Management (2025)
  • Finalist, Best OM Paper in Operations Research Award (2025)
  • Third Prize, INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (2025)
  • Honorable Mention, INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition (2024)
  • Presented at MSOM Sustainable Operations SIG Conference (2024)
  • Winner, POMS College of Sustainable Operations Student Paper Competition (2024)
  • Honorable Mention, INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Best Student Paper Award (2023)
  Paper Summary

  Increasing ocean plastic pollution is irreversibly harming ecosystems and human economic activities. We partner with a Dutch NGO, The Ocean Cleanup (TOC), and use optimization to help clean up oceans from plastic faster. In our paper, we optimize the route of their plastic collection system in the ocean to maximize the quantity of plastic collected over time. On one-year ocean data, our optimization-based routing approach increases the quantity of plastic collected by over 60% compared with their current routing strategy, hence speeding up the progress towards plastic-free oceans.

  

  

Working Paper

• Optimal Experimental Design with Routing Constraints Preprint
  Working Paper, 2025, with Jean Pauphilet

Works in Progress

• Moving Fast and Slow: Speed Optimization for Ocean Cleanup Operations
  With Jean Pauphilet

• Calculating a Diverse Set of Near-Optimal Solutions: Why and How?
  With Dick den Hertog, Jean Pauphilet, and Justin Starreveld

• Designing Wildfire-Aware Powerlines via Stochastic Bottleneck Problem
  With Jean Pauphilet and Guillermo Rein