Research meetup 2 – Dear mathematician: why are you here? We need to move tonnages and help hungry people
In this webinar we will highlight Tilburg University’s (The Netherlands) work at the United Nations – World Food Programme (WFP) headquarters in Rome. WFP is the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, reaching around 90 million people with food assistance in 80 countries each year. By connecting traditional supply chain elements to nutritional objectives, we made significant breakthroughs in the operational excellence of WFP’s most complex operations, such as Iraq and Yemen. We show how we used optimization to reduce the operational costs in Iraq by 12%, without compromising the nutritional value of the ration. Finally we will highlight some of the typical aspects in working as a mathematician in these teams. And we will elaborate on the follow up of this work in the form of the Zero Hunger Lab (ZHL) in Tilburg, The Netherlands.