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Home > Staff Profiles > Professor Adam Letchford

Professor Adam Letchford FORS

Professor

Research Overview

Professor Letchford's research is in optimisation, i.e., finding the best solution to problems that have a huge (possibly infinite) number of solutions.  Optimisation is an inter-disciplinary subject, lying at the interface between Operational Research, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics and Engineering.

Professor Letchford concentrates mainly on methods for solving optimisation problems to proven optimality, rather than heuristic methods.  He also has a particular interest in combinatorial optimisation problems, i.e., problems in which variables are restricted to take integer (whole-number) values.

Profile

Professor Letchford is recognised internationally for his work on optimisation.  He has published over 50 papers in highly-ranked journals and edited books, many of which were co-authored with prominent overseas researchers.  He has been on the editorial boards of 6 journals: Computational Optimization and Applications, Discrete Optimization, EURO Journal of Computational Optimization, Mathematical Programming, Mathematical Programming Computation and Operations Research. He has given over 40 presentations at international conferences, including 5 plenaries, and over 30 invited seminars in Europe and the US. He has also been on the programme committees of 10 international conferences.

In 2006, he became the recipient of a prestigious IBM Faculty Award. In the same year, he was awarded a 5-year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship.  In 2009, he became a Fellow of the Operational Research Society.  He is currently co-ordinating the optimisation cluster of the LANCS Initiative, and also directing NATCOR, the national taught course centre in Operational Research. He is also organising a 4-week residential programme on optimisation, due to take place at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge in 2013.

My Role

Present:

• Professor of Optimisation
• Coordinator of the Optimisation Research Centre
• Member of the Management Science Research Steering Committee

Past:

• Undergraduate Admissions Tutor for Management Science
• Director of the BBA in European Management
• Chair of the Management Science Research Steering Committee

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) Linguistics & Psychology, Nottingham, 1989
• MSc Operational Research, Lancaster, 1993
• PhD Management Science, Lancaster, 1997

Career Details

Before coming to Lancaster, Adam Letchford spent two years as a research assistant in the Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham (1989-1991).

Current Teaching

• MSCI502: Introduction to Operational Research
• MSCI534: Optimisation and Heuristics
• MSCI536: Optimisation (for STOR-i and Quantitative Finance students)

External Roles

• Coordinator of the LANCS Optimisation Cluster (since 2008)
• Director of NATCOR (since 2012)
• Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College (since 2006)
• Writer for Mathematical Reviews (2007-2012).

PhDs Examined

Balázs Kotnyek (2002) A Generalization of Totally Unimodular and Network Matrices. London School of Economics.

Jakub Marecek (2011) Exploiting Structure in Integer Programs.  School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

Web Links

Official web page: www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/mansci/profiles/adam-letchford/

Personal web page: www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/letchfoa

Thesis Title

Polyhedral Approaches to Some Constrained Arc Routing Problems

Other Interests and Hobbies

Cycling; playing piano, bass guitar, flute and saxophone; theology.

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