Luana Almeida
Degrees
- B.Sc. Industrial Engineering, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 2018.
Bio
Luana Almeida started her career in Brazil where she completed her undergraduate studies in Industrial Engineering at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. In 2014, she received a scholarship from Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa Desenvolvimento Tecnológico (CNPq) and studied for one year at Dalhousie University. During her visit at Dal, Luana discovered her passion for Operations Research and how it can be used to help others.
After completing her studies in Brazil, Luana joined MARS and started the Master of Applied Sciences program at Dalhousie University. She had the opportunity to work with Operations Research in the context of natural disasters and started to focus on meta-heuristics as a tool to develop humanitarian logistics models. During the Master program, Luana received two awards. First, she was one the members of the Dal team that won the first place in the Logistics and Supply Chain Study Case Competition 2019 sponsored by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE). Secondly, she won a poster competition in the Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response (MEOPAR) 2019 Annual Scientific Meeting in the master’s category.
In September 2019, Luana received two grants (MITACS Globalink Research Awards and MEOPAR Training Awards) that funded a 3-month visit to the ANT/OR research group at University of Antwerp in Belgium. During this visit, Luana worked with different heuristics and meta-heuristics methods that can be applied in the context of humanitarian logistics.
Luana was transferred to the doctoral program at Dalhousie University in January 2020 and is currently studying the distribution of relief supplies after natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes and hurricanes) in Canada.
Awards
- IISE Logistics and Supply Chain Student Case Competition, 1st place, graduate level. 2019.
- Poster competition at MEOPAR Annual Scientific Meeting, 1st place, master’s category. 2019.
Research Interests
- Humanitarian Logistics
- Meta-heuristics
- Network optimization
- Graph Theory
The different types of meta-heuristics methods that can be applied in the context humanitarian logistics are Luana’s main research interests. In terms of heuristics, Luana is interested on its implementation, sensitivity analysis and performance. She is also interested in the use of graph theory concepts as a tool to improve such methods. In relation to humanitarian logistics, Luana is focused on different models that can be used in the immediate response phase of natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes and hurricanes).
Conference Articles
Almeida L.S., Goerlandt F., Pelot R. 2019. Effects of major hurricanes in Atlantic Canada from 2013 to 2018. 7th International Conference on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, Athens, Greece, 15-19.10.2019, 9p.