BMS Postdoc Dr. Nicole Megow has been awarded this year's Berlin Science Prize for junior scientists, worth ten thousand euros. Each year, the mayor of Berlin recognizes one senior scientist and one junior scientist for their outstanding research.
Dr. Megow is head of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group "Models, algorithms and complexity for scheduling under uncertainty" at TU Berlin, and also a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken. She did her doctorate at TU Berlin and Matheon under Rolf Möhring; her work on stochastic and online models for scheduling was awarded the 2007 dissertation prize of the German Operations Research Society.
Berlin Senator Sandra Scheeres delivered the prize to Dr. Megow personally, saying, "Dr. Megow has contributed as a mathematician to the solution of important industrial problems. I congratulate her on this important and well-deserved award." TU President Jörg Steinbach added, "This is a great honor, not only for Dr. Megow but also for TU Berlin."
Dr. Megow's research interests in combinatorial optimization include approximation algorithms for scheduling, resource allocation and routing problems. In particular, she looks at various models (online, stochastic, robust, universal) for uncertainty in the input data. For instance, she has worked to optimize the crane scheduling at a container terminal port in Sydney as well as process planning for steel production.
