Prof. Burcu Balçık Delivered Plenary Talk at International EWGLA 2025 Conference

Prof. Burcu Balçık, a faculty member at the Industrial Engineering Department and the Academic Director of the Sustainability Platform at Özyeğin University, delivered a plenary talk at the International EWGLA (EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis) 2025 Conference, held at Universidad de Cádiz, Spain, between September 17 and 19, 2025.

Prof. Dr. Balçık, in her talk titled “Location and Transportation Problems in Humanitarian Logistics: Models, Insights, and Future Directions,” highlighted the critical importance of location and transportation decisions in humanitarian logistics. She emphasized that making these decisions effectively has a direct impact on disaster response capacity. She also underlined the value of academic–practitioner collaborations, noting that combining field experience with scientific modeling is essential to developing more effective solutions.

In her speech, she also shared her ongoing research on anticipatory action, which connects predictive methods with optimization-based decision models to mitigate the impacts of disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires before they fully unfold. These studies aim to reduce humanitarian and economic losses by enabling early interventions prior to disaster onset.

For more information:
https://ewgla2025.uca.es/
https://ewgla2025.uca.es/plenary-speakers/