dr. R (Rene) Haijema

Rene Haijema is Associate Professor in Operations Research and Logistics at Wageningen University. His main research interest is inventory management and food waste reduction at retail supply chains.

He graduated with distinction from University of Amsterdam. In 2008 he obtained a PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam. His PhD thesis shows fundamental research on applying Markov Decision Theory to amongst other production and inventory management of blood products. The software he has developed is upgraded for practical use by blood banks.

This work has been awarded with national and international prices and nominations, e.g. ORTEC Excellence in Advanced Planning Award awarded by Dutch association of operations research (NGB) and ORTEC, INFORMS Best Poster Award, and finalist of the KNAW-Christiaan Huygens Science Award, and of the Euro Excellence in Practice Award.  He is member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Inventory Research (ISIR).

In recent research at Wageningen University he collaborates in multi-disciplinary teams with scientists and industry to do science with practical impact. He participates in national and European projects on combating food waste. He has supervised in the past years four PhD students and currently supervises three PhD students on topics around food supply chains and digital cities. In EU-Horizon-2020 project REFRESH he collaborates and supervises a PhD student on the topic of dynamic pricing and inventory management to reduce food waste.