“Mathematics to me is humanity’s effort to find absolute truths and to approach reality. Stochastic processes in particular illustrate perfectly the regularity to be found even in chaos.”

Maria Vlasiou is a Full Professor at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, an Associate Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), a Research Fellow of the European research institute EURANDOM, and the current chair of the Dutch women in mathematics network. Her research centres on the performance of stochastic processing networks with layered architectures. She currently runs three NWO projects on the topic, focusing on energy networks, high-tech manufacturing, and stochastic interacting networks, and an additional project from the Australian Research Council on interacting networks in cells related to insulin signalling. Other interests include Lévy processes, perturbation analysis for heavy-tailed risk models, large deviations for non-monotone stochastic recursions, and proportional fairness in heavy traffic for bandwidth-sharing networks. She has supervised six PhD theses on these topics.

Prof. Vlasiou is associate editor in three journals and has refereed for about 45 international journals, conferences, and national science foundations. Her research has been funded by grants exceeding 4.5M from more than 10 science foundations, universities, societies, and organisations. She is the co-author of more than 45 refereed papers, the co-recipient of the best paper award in ICORES 2013, the Marcel Neuts student paper award in MAM8, and of the 3^rd prize of the 8th conference in Actuarial Science.

Maria Vlasiou received her BSc (2002, Hons.) and PhD (2006) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and TU/e, respectively. In 2006, she moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked as a Research Engineer and as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She currently is a full professor at the University of Twente. Her research has been funded by grants from more than 10 science foundations and organizations. 

Dr. Vlasiou serves on the editorial boards of IISE Transactions, of Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, and of OR Spectrum. She is also the president of the executive board of the European Women in Mathematics – The Netherlands (EWM-NL), the Dutch association of female professional mathematicians. In addition, she is a member of the scientific advisory board in mathematics of the Lorenz Center, the Dutch international centre for scientific workshops.

• ATINER
• BETA
• CWI
• EURANDOM
• EWM The Netherlands
• INFOMRS
• LNMB
• Lorenz Center

Partners in (semi-)industry

• ASML
• Philips Healthcare
• VDL/ETG

Stochastic Processing Interacting Networks (University of Twente)

Stochastic resource-sharing networks (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Maria Vlasiou teaches courses in Probability, Stochastic processes, infectious-disease epidemiology, and performance modelling. She regularly supervises BSc, MSc, and PhD theses, internships, and PDEng projects. She is also a Bachelor College coach and a student mentor. 

Prof. Vlasiou has obtained her UTQ diploma in 2010 and has continued her training in education through various professional development courses. She has served in the departmental Didactics committee and UTQ committee and has obtained several grants on research in mathematics education.