The 45th meeting of the Operations Research Society of South Africa was held at the beautiful Lanzerac Wine Estate in Stellenbosch on 11 to 14 September 2016. Several members of the Department of Statistical Sciences attended the meeting, presenting talks as part of the extensive programme on topics of risk and cost modelling, malaria disease modelling, heuristics for portfolio decision analysis and multicriteria decision analysis.
The conference programme included an Operations Research Wine Hunt where participants were required to solve a series of mathematical and statistical problems to win prizes and the annual conference banquet where the Society's awards are made. The Society's premier award, the Tom Rozwadowski medal, was awarded to Dr Sheetal Silal for the best written contribution to Operations Research published by a member of the Society during the previous year. The award was made for the publication Hitting a Moving Target: A Model for Malaria Elimination in the Presence of Population Movement, an output of Dr Silal's PhD studies supervised by A/Prof Francesca Little in the Department of Statistical Sciences, Prof Karen Barnes from the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at UCT and Prof Lisa White from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Disease Research Unit.
Silal SP, Little F, Barnes KI, White LJ (2015) Hitting a Moving Target: A Model for Malaria Elimination in the Presence of Population Movement. PLOS ONE 10(12): e0144990. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144990
Top - Conference Banquet: (Left to right) Ian Durbach, Georgina Rakotonirainy, Sheetal Silal, Theo Stewart & Timothy Blake
Left - Tea break: (Left to right) Theo Stewart, Babooshka Shavazipour & Jonathan Winnaar
Right - 2007 MSc reunion: Sheetal Silal & Timothy Blake