Jean Bertrand Gauthier Wins the Best PhD Dissertation Award
May 30, 2017
The 2016 award for the best PhD dissertation went to Jean Bertrand Gauthier (PhD 2016, Management Sciences), for his thesis entitled Primal Algorithms for Degenerate Linear and Network Flow Problems.
Supervised by Professor Jacques Desrosiers, Jean Bertrand’s dissertation was praised for its quality, impact, originality and potential social contribution.
It presents methodological solutions to the phenomenon of degeneracy, first of all, by considering network problems. Degeneracy has been studied for 60 years now, and is a decisive factor in the practical efficiency of the simplex algorithm. While the algorithm is used to try to improve a solution, for instance routing of mail-delivery vehicles, degeneracy leads to numerous unproductive calculations.
What Makes this Dissertation Exceptional?
By bringing together optimization concepts around primal algorithms, the dissertation concludes that degeneracy is algorithmic, rather than inherent to the problem at hand. This research will make a great contribution to the Montréal IT industry, not only for the optimization software companies AD OPT and GIRO, but also for all their clients around the world. The findings of the dissertation will certainly be reflected in both basic and advanced textbooks in the near future.
About the Winner
Jean Bertrand Gauthier holds an MSc in Management Sciences from HEC Montréal and a Bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science from UQAM. This is by no means his first award from the School. He also won the award for the best Master’s thesis, in 2011–2012, and the 2015 Esdras Minville Award (student).
He is also the 350th doctoral student at HEC Montréal to successfully defend his dissertation. In addition, he was recommended to the Association des doyens des études supérieures au Québec (ADESAQ) for its competition for the best dissertation in the field of natural science and engineering. He is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, in Germany, and is also collaborating on a project with the Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD).
Congratulations to Jean Bertrand, who received a prize of $3,000, and to the finalists for the award for the best PhD dissertation in 2016:
| Finalists | Supervisors | Dissertations |
|---|---|---|
| Amir Ardestani Jaafari | Erick Delage | Linearized Robust Counterparts with Applications in Location and Inventory Management Problems |
| Emilie Gibeau | Ann Langley Jean-Louis Denis (Université de Montréal) |
L’intégration de professionnels dans des rôles de gestion : identité, coleadership et légitimité |
| Fernando Freitas Fachin | Ann Langley | Organizational Identity Work in Open Innovation Entrepreneurship |
| Gregory Vial | Suzanne Rivard | Three Essays on Information Systems Development |
| Jean-François Bégin | Geneviève Gauthier | Four Essays on Applications of Filtering Methods in Finance |
| Louis-Étienne Dubois | Patrick Cohendet | Le pilotage de la genèse de communautés créatives par le codesign : contextes, dynamiques et organisations |
| Valérie Bélanger | Patrick Soriano | Gestion de l’incertitude dans les problèmes de localisation et application à la gestion des services préhospitaliers d’urgence |
| Yaovi Gassesse Siliadin | Michèle Breton | Essays on Credit Risk and Callable Bonds Valuation |
| Éléonore Fabienne Gouba | Hafedh Bouakez | Foreign Aid, Inequality and Fiscal Policy in Developing Countries |