From left to right: Bahar Y. Kara, Timothy Lowe, UPS Representative, Joh Bhadury, Barbaros Tansel

    Dr. Bahar Yetiş Kara, a 1999 Ph.D. graduate of the Department of Industrial Engineering, has won the prestigious UPS-SOLA (The United Parcel Service - Section on Locational Analysis of INFORMS) Dissertation Award for the year 2001 for her dissertation entitled “Modelling and Analysis of Issues in Hub Location Problems”, supervised by Dr. Barbaros Tansel. The award and the accompanying cash prize of 1000 USD were presented to Dr. Bahar Y. Kara in a special ceremony at the annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) in Miami last month. Dr. Kara presented her work at a special session held in her honor.
    The UPS-SOLA Dissertation Award is a bi-annual award given to the author of the best dissertation in the area of Location Analysis. In citing the award, the selection committee stated that “The dissertation is a good blend of theory and empirical work. It deals with a problem whose importance is manifested by its many applications.
    A large number of physical distribution systems are designed, or will be designed, as hub and spoke structures. The theoretical work of the thesis includes the development of a new hub location model, viz., the latest arrival model, while the empirical work includes the testing of several lower bounds for the classical hub location model. In addition, the author develops a new linearization of that model which seems to perform quite well in comparison with existing linearizations.”
    After receiving her PhD. from Bilkent, Dr. Kara has been a postdoctoral fellow for two years at McGill University in Montreal. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering.