Biography
Rick Willemsen is a postdoctoral researcher at Singapore University of Technology and Design since January 2026. He received his PhD in Operations Research and Statistics from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2025. His research interests lie in applying mathematical programming techniques to a wide variety of topics, including clustering, dimension reduction, data generation, transportation, brain connectomes and cancer identification.
Education
- PhD in Operations Research and Statistics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2020-2025)
- MSc in Econometrics and Management Science with a specialisation in Business Analytics and Quantitative Marketing (2019-2021)
- MSc in Econometrics and Management Science with a specialisation in Operations Research and Quantitative Logistics (2019-2020)
- BSc in Econometrics and Operations Research (2015-2019)
- BSc in Economics and Business Economics (2015-2019)
Research interests
- Operations research
- Mathematical programming
Selected publications
- Willemsen, R., Cavicchia, C., van den Heuvel, W., & van de Velden, M. (2025). An exact solution approach for hierarchical clustering. INFORMS Journal on Computing.
- Willemsen, R. S., van de Velden, M., & van den Heuvel, W. (2024). On the uniqueness of correspondence analysis solutions. Linear Algebra and its Applications, 690, 162-185.
- Willemsen, R. S., Van Den Heuvel, W., & Van De Velden, M. (2023). A new mixed integer programming approach for inverse correspondence analysis. Computers & Operations Research, 160, 106375.
- Willemsen, R. S. H., Aloise, D., & Jans, R. (2025). Accelerating Benders decomposition for the p-median problem through variable aggregation. Les Cahiers du GERAD ISSN, 711, 2440.
- Willemsen, R. S., Heuvel, W. V. D., & Van de Velden, M. (2025). Generating Random Vectors satisfying Linear and Nonlinear Constraints. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16936.
Awards
- 1st place in the junior category of the ROADEF2022 Competition