Marie-Ève Rancourt saluted for her innovative and inspiring research

Research by Professor Marie-Ève Rancourt was selected by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) as one of the winning initiatives in the 2019 Innovations That Inspire Challenge.

The Association launched the competition to identify new and inspiring research approaches that create value added.

The AACSB is an association for the accreditation and promotion of business schools, and HEC Montréal is one of the 836 institutions worldwide to hold AACSB International certification.

Professor Rancourt’s work focuses on developing specific solutions to complex optimization problems, particularly to address humanitarian crises, and have concrete spinoff.

These solutions were recently successfully applied in three parts of the world facing natural disasters:

• In the Caribbean, they helped enhance local emergency authorities’ preparedness to respond after hurricanes. The mathematical model developed in this case makes it possible to determine the location and amounts of emergency supplies to be stockpiled, and the necessary investments.
• In Nepal, after the earthquake in 2015, the solution developed improved the restoration of water distribution networks in this mountainous region. An optimization tool made it possible to locate community water taps and design a lower-cost pipeline network.
• In East Africa, an analytical framework was developed to improve the performance of the supply chain of the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD). This allowed the organization to reduce its operating costs and maximize aid delivery in this region that is faced with recurring famines. 

About Marie-Ève Rancourt

Marie-Ève Rancourt holds a PhD in Administration from HEC Montréal. She has been an Associate Professor with the Department of Logistics and Operations Management since 2016. She is also a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation.

Visit the research site for more information on Professor Rancourt’s work.