Dr. ir. J.M. (Marjan) van den Akker

Associate Professor
Algorithmic Data Analysis
Simulation of Complex Systems
+31 30 253 3989
j.m.vandenakker@uu.nl

Marjan van den Akker obtained her PhD in Mathematics from Eindhoven University of Technology in the area of scheduling, i.e. assigning tasks to scarce resources over time. After her PhD, she has worked on modelling, optimization, and simulation in Air Traffic Management and Road Pricing at the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR, the Netherlands. Currently, she is Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University and holds a joint senior position with KLM within the KickstartAI program. Her research is in the intersection of Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence and is about advanced planning algorithms, robust planning and simulation and includes optimization of planning and control in public transportation and energy networks.  Her research is strongly oriented on applications. She has elaborate experience on collaboration with industry. Besides KLM, she is currently working with NS, ProRail, Qbuzz, Tennet, and Jumbo. She is working on Operations Research within a Computer Science department, which is unique for the Netherlands and gives her a good position for experimental research and close connections to CS expertise on data and efficient computation. She supervises several PhD's and master students. Her work is published in well-known international journals and conferences in Computer Science and Operations Research. She teaches the course Optimization for Sustainability in the master program Computing Science. 

She is scientific director of the Utrecht AI & Mobility Lab and the Robust Rail Lab. Moreover, is a member of the executive board of the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research (Landelijk Netwerk Mathematische Besliskunde, LNMB).