Dr Glory Alozie, a PhD graduate of the Management Science Department, has won The OR Society Doctoral Award which is given for the 'Most Distinguished Body of Research leading to the Award of a Doctorate in the field of Operational Research'.
Glory completed her PhD in 2021 and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Strathclyde. Glory received her award at The OR Society’s Blackett Lecture early in December. The OR Society - the world's first body set up to cater for the operational research profession back in 1948 - is the major society of OR academics and practitioners in the UK, with more than 3,000 members in more than 50 countries.
Glory’s thesis proposed new models and algorithms for the "distance-based critical node detection problem", which is a challenging problem stemming from practice, with numerous applications ranging from assessing the impact of failures in telecommunication or gas/water/power networks, to maximising the resilience of networks used in humanitarian operations to save more lives in disasters or in defence operations to counter enemy attacks. Glory has developed a range of methods that can address this problem in very large networks with significant computational efficiency, and obtain optimal results in many settings.
Glory's nomination for the award included strong praise from her external examiner, who commented on her 'fine doctoral work' and 'there is strong interest in the findings from both theoreticians and practitioners'. Glory's PhD supervisors from the Management Science Department, Professor Kerem Akartunali and Dr Ashwin Arulselvan (pictured with Glory), assessed Glory's work as the best dissertation they have seen over many years of their careers.
As the winner of the award, Glory received a cash prize of £1500 and has her name engraved on the George Paterson Memorial Shield as a permanent record of her achievement. Glory is currently collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory in the US who are interested in applying the results of her research.