Back to 20w2253 workshop webpage
Peter Taylor received a BSc(Hons) and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Adelaide in 1980 and 1987 respectively. In between, he spent time working for the Australian Public Service in Canberra. After periods at the Universities of Western Australia and Adelaide, he moved at the beginning of 2002 to the University of Melbourne. In January 2003, he took up a position as the inaugural Professor of Operations Research. He was Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2005 until 2010.
Peter's research interests lie in the fields of stochastic modelling and applied probability, with particular emphasis on applications in telecommunications, biological modelling, healthcare, economics and disaster management.
Peter is the Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Probability Trust journals Journal of Applied Probability and Advances in Applied Probability and was the Editor-in-Chief of Stochastic Models between 2002 and 2018. He is also a member of the editorial board of Queueing Systems.
From 2006 to 2008, Peter was Chair of the Australia and New Zealand Division of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM), and from 2010 to 2012 he was the President of the Australian Mathematical Society. In 2013 he was awarded a Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council, and in 2016 he became Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS).
In 2017, he was awarded the Ren Potts Medal by the Australian Society for Operations Research, in 2018 the George Szekeres Medal by the Australian Mathematical Society and in 2019 the ANZIAM Medal.
Winfried Grassmann studied economics at the University of Zurich. After obtaining his degree in 1963, he joined Swissair, the then Swiss flag carrier to work in the operations research department. While there, he worked together with Karl Oesch who introduced the method Grassmann/Oesch for aircraft maintenance, one of the most successful operations research applications within the company. At the same time, he worked on his Ph.D. thesis in economics which he finished in 1968 with summa cum laude. In 1969, he joined the department of computer science at the University of Saskatchewan, where he is now as a professor emeritus. Dr. Grassmann has published widely in the areas of queueing theory and simulation. His best known contributions are the randomization or uniformization method, and the GTH (Grassmann/Taksar/Heyman) method. In 1999, he received the Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society, and in 2004 the service award of the same society. In November 2015, he was the recipient of the Continuing Contribution Award of the University of Saskatchewan retirees association. He has been associate editor of different journals, including Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, INFOR, as well as the INFORMS Journal on Computing, where he later became area editor until the end of 2018. He also wrote or edited several books.