We are pleased to announce Associate Professor Fabricio Oliveira as Head of Section for Decision Science at DTU Management.
Fabricio’s research focuses strongly on energy and process systems, and how they can be redesigned to better adapt to climate change, improving their resilience to extreme weather and prioritizing the curbing of emissions. His drive to combat climate change is rooted in a deep attachment to nature and a desire to preserve it for future generations.
A common challenge when facing climate change is uncertainty. We don't know exactly how or when things will worsen, but we know they're getting worse every day. Therefore, important decisions made in infrastructure development must take climate change into account if they are expected to function as planned decades from now. Improving the efficiency and resilience of these systems is key.
Following his new position, Fabricio is excited about advancing the integration of machine learning and optimization methods, particularly in stochastic and robust optimization, thereby pushing the boundaries of what these methods can achieve before they can be confidently applied to real-world settings. Machine learning offers tremendous potential in this area, especially in developing hybrid approaches where ML can inform and enhance optimization tools.
Fabricio is also looking forward to teaching students at DTU and incorporating new perspectives into our future researchers:
“Teaching is an important part of my role. More than just delivering content, courses are an opportunity to shape how our future engineers, decision-makers, and scientists approach problems. The most rewarding part is seeing students incorporate new perspectives into their thinking. The course "Decisions Under Uncertainty," for example, is about why and how to rethink standard analytical tools so they account for what you can't know for sure.”