OR is Coming Home!

by John Medhurst

As Baddiel and Skinner observed in song in 1996, when the European football championships were hosted in the UK, the time has come for Operational Research to come back home, with the European festival of OR that is the EURO conference returning to the UK for the first time since Glasgow in 2015. The EURO conference will be in Leeds in June and is organised under the joint auspices of the Leeds University Business School and the UK Operational Research Society.

The conference will see the first Systems Thinking stream at a EURO conference, reflecting the strong UK interest in this field. There will also be a practitioner focus to the conference, with an extensive Making an Impact stream organised by Ruth Kaufman.

As with all EURO conferences this will be an event on an enormous scale, with around 2000 OR academics and practitioners likely to descend upon Leeds and a huge range of streams covering everything from Health to Discrete Optimisation. Early booking is recommended.

The Events programme over the last year began with a hybrid Beale lecture and a well-attended start to a new series of one day joint SIG events with a session on Making Better Futures with Systems Approaches.

In June we held our first New2OR event since before the pandemic. Congratulations are due to the organising committee for establishing a successful new one-day format for this event. July saw another first for the Society, with a special event at the House of Lords to celebrate our 75th anniversary. The reception was held on the terrace, with a fine view along the Thames towards the London Eye and Big Ben. The event was hosted by Lord Clement Jones on behalf of the Society, giving us an opportunity to say thank you to some of the volunteers whose efforts have built the Society over the past 75 years.

Continuing the new theme our ISMOR conference moved to a new venue in the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, with an unprecedented move to multiple sessions to accommodate demand and an outing to the Isle of Wight.

The annual conference in 2024 was in Bangor, with the OR community migrating to this beautiful and historic corner of North Wales for a very enjoyable event, with highlights including a hike in the mountains and the group photo in the historic courtyard at Bangor University. Many thanks to all those who contributed to the success of this event.

Finishing the year with the Blackett Lecture was Anna Nagurney, who flew over from Boston to give a very interesting talk on OR and the modelling of networks.

The conference programme in 2025 has already begun, with a hybrid Beale Lecture at the University of Southampton and the 2025 Simulation Workshop in Exeter.

So, hopefully I will see all of you in Leeds in June to help decide who has the best OR-themed variation on Baddiel and Skinner for the singalong in the bar.

www.theorsociety.com/EURO2025