Major EPSRC award for Adam Letchford

Dr Adam Letchford, of the Department of Management Science, has recently been awarded an Advanced Research Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The fellowship, which will begin in August 2006 and be of five years' duration, is concerned with quadratic optimisation problems.

Adam originally graduated in Linguistics and Psychology at Nottingham University, but then had a change in direction and came to Lancaster to do an MSc and PhD in Operational Research.

He worked as a Research Associate between 1998 and 1999 and became a Lecturer in 2000. In 2005 he was promoted to Reader in Optimisation.

He is on the editorial boards of the journals Mathematical Programming and Computational Optimization and Applications. In addition, Adam has gained an IBM Faculty Award. These are tremendous achievements and bring considerable kudos to Adam and the Department of Management Science. The EPSRC fellowship is the first to be awarded in Operational Research and shows how difficult it has been for OR to gain the recognition that Adam has now received.

Why should we care about quadratic optimisation? In fact it has widespread applications in Operational Research (facility location, project selection) and quantitative finance (portfolio selection), in addition to telecommunications, physics, computer science, statistics, computational biology, and several branches of mathematics - such as graph theory and the geometry of numbers.