Prof. Gabriele Eichfelder is the new program director of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization

Prof. Gabriele Eichfelder, head of the Group for Mathematical Methods in Operations Research at the TU Ilmenau, has been elected to a senior position in the Activity Group on Optimization of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The non-profit international organization SIAM brings together more than 14,000 members from research and industry with the goal of promoting the application of mathematics and computational science in engineering, industry, science, and society. Of these, over a thousand members are organized in the Activity Group on Optimization.

In particular, as Program Director of the Activity Group on Optimization, Prof. Eichfelder is one of the organizers of the triennial SIAM Conference on Optimization 2026, which will be held this year in Seattle to present the latest research on theory, algorithms, software, and applications for optimization problems. It brings together mathematicians, operations researchers, computer scientists, engineers, software developers, and practitioners, providing an ideal environment for the exchange of new ideas and important problems between optimization specialists and users in academia, government, and industry.

Prof. Eichfelder has been a university professor for Mathematical Methods of Operations Research at the Institute of Mathematics at TU Ilmenau since April 2012. Previously, she was a research associate and later a temporary academic councilor at the Department of Mathematics, Chair of Applied Mathematics II (Optimization) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. As head of her Group, she is concerned with the theoretical and numerical investigation of optimization problems. The focus is on continuous optimization problems, but also mixed-integer nonlinear problems are the subject of her investigations. Her main research interests are the theory of vector and set optimization, numerical methods of vector and set optimization and thus also of multiobjective optimization, global optimization such as mixed-integer optimization, and optimization problems in applications.

She is the author of a large number of publications, including books as well as scientific papers, which have received several best paper awards. She also holds several patents, including a Method and Device for Determining a Magnetic Resonance System Control Sequence and a Method for Determining Sensitivity Matrices for Hotspots.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is an international community with over 14,000 individual members. Nearly 500 academic, manufacturing, research, and development organizations worldwide are institutional members. SIAM was founded in 1952 as a nonprofit organization to provide useful mathematical knowledge to other professionals who can implement mathematical theories for practical, industrial, or scientific purposes. The Activity Group on Optimization began its activities in 1986. This working group promotes the development of optimization theory, methods, and software - and in particular the development and analysis of efficient methods and their implementation in high-quality software.