Marie-Ève Rancourt awarded a Canada Research Chair
June 17, 2021
Marie-Ève Rancourt, Associate Professor in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management, is now the holder of a new Canada Research Chair in Humanitarian Supply Chain Analytics. Her appointment will officially take effect on July 1.
The Chair was created thanks to federal government funding of $120,000 annually for the first 5 years, with the possibility of renewed annual funding of $100,000 for another 5 years, amounting to a total of $1.1 million over 10 years.
The Chair will strengthen Canadian expertise and HEC Montréal’s reputation in logistical operations management to support development assistance and humanitarian disaster response.
Decision making for humanitarian assistance
Professor Rancourt’s research as Chairholder will help develop state-of-the-art methods based on operational research principles and data analysis, to enhance decision making and co-operation in humanitarian supply chains.
Humanitarian supply chains, a key subject in Professor Rancourt’s research for many years now, are notable for their great complexity, owing to the many sources of uncertainty and particular constraints arising from humanitarian crises, stakeholders’ diverging interests, and limited access to resources and information.
The Chair’s work will lead to concrete applications that can be useful in the field, in responding to natural disasters or emergencies due to human activity. For instance:identifying locations for and improving infrastructures and emergency shelters planning food aid distribution and designing and managing collaborative prepositioning networks “I am extremely proud to have been awarded this Chair, since it will let me put together Canada’s first research group on humanitarian logistics – a group that I hope will be recognized as one of the best in the world. We will have the means to attract and retain accomplished postdoctoral interns and the most promising students, and so to improve training and scientific output relating to humanitarian logistics,” she says.
About Marie-Ève Rancourt
Professor Rancourt holds a PhD in Administration from HEC Montréal and has been a faculty member since 2016. She is also affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT).
She is one of the few scholars specializing in humanitarian logistics in Canada. She collaborates with a number of humanitarian organizations, including the UN World Food Programme, Food Banks of Quebec, the Red Cross and the World Bank. Her fields of interest in teaching and research also concern the analysis, modelling and optimization of transportation networks, operations management and sustainable development, and supply chain management.
She has published several scientific articles in the most prestigious management journals, including Production and Operations Management, Transportation Science and Omega. One of these articles received the 2019 Best Paper Award from the College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management of the Production and Operations Management Society.
That same year, she was selected by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business as one of its Innovations That Inspire challenge winners.
