Alberto Caprara

On April 21, 2012, our colleague and very dear friend Alberto Caprara unexpectedly and immaturely passed away in a mountaineering accident at Corno alle Scale (an Apennine mountain close to Bologna). A University of Bologna web page was created to collect the memories from his colleagues and friends.  Alberto was born in Ivrea on January 9, 1968 and obtained both his Mater and his Doctoral degree at the University of Bologna. In 1991 he obtained a M.S. degree “cum laude” in Electronic Engineering and in 1996 he obtained a Ph.D. degree in “Control System Engineering and Operational Research".  Alberto spent his entire academic and scientific career at DEIS (Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems), Faculty of Engineering, University of Bologna. He held a position as Assistant Professor from 1996 to 2001, then turned to Associate Professor from 2001 to 2005 and finally got the position of Full Professor from 2005. He published more than 100 scientific papers (many of which published in “Operations Research”, “INFORMS Journal on Computing”, “Mathematics of Operations Research”, "Mathematical Programming”, “Transportation Science”), concerning the design, implementation and analysis of exact and approximate algorithms for     Combinatorial Optimization problems, application to real-world Transportation, Logistics, Computational Biology, Railway Optimization systems. A list of his publications can be found on his google scholar profile. He was awarded the following prizes: • in 1992 the “Francini” prize of AEI (Italian Electrical and Electronic Society) for the best Italian M.S. Dissertation in Electronic Engineering;• in 1997 the “George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award” of INFORMS for the best Ph.D. Dissertation on O.R. applications;• in 2000 the “1999 Best Paper Award” of the “Journal of Combinatorial Optimization”. Finally Alberto was member of the Editorial Boards of: “Operations Research”, “Mathematical Programming C”, “Operations Research Letters” journals.He has been co-Editor of  “Optima” (the Newsletter of the Mathematical Programming Society) from 2002 to 2010, plenary lecturer at several international conferences and Program Chairman of ATMOS 2011.