Gilles Savard is a professor at Polytechnique Montréal since 1993. From 2001 to 2007, he served as Chair of the Mathematics and Industrial Engineering Department before becoming in 2007 Chief Innovation and International Officer (Directeur de la recherche, de l’innovation et des affaires internationales). Since January 2017, he is the General Director of the new Institute for Data Valorisation (IVADO), an initiative of HEC Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal and the Université de Montréal, which brings together more than 70 industrial, institutional and government partners is an advanced and multidisciplinary competence center in statistics, artificial intelligence and operational research linking more than 1200 scientists.

He has published over 100 scientific papers in the field of operations research and supervised more than 80 graduate students over the course of his career. Mr. Savard is a specialist in bilevel mathematical programming, with applications in energy and transportation. For 20 years, he has carried out numerous projects on the planning of peace missions with the Defence Department. He has also developed, with a few collaborators, an innovative approach in the field of revenue management now commercialized by ExPretio for railway companies.

Mr. Savard was an important player in the EUGENE project which won the award for best application in operational research in Canada in 1999 as well as for the creation of ExPretio, which was honoured by NSERC/ADRIQ in 2010 for the quality of its partnerships. He was awarded the 2017 Personality Innovation Award by ADRIQ and is Chevalier de l’ordre des Palmes académiques de la République française. He is a member of several boards of directors.