Zoe O'Connor
Research Associate
MMath, PhD
Dr Zoe O’Connor is a Research Associate in the Centre for Logistics and Sustainability and is responsible for the development and maintenance of mathematical models for sustainable logistics operations.
One aspect of this involves modelling scenarios involving storage and transportation of cold-chain goods such as perishable food products or vaccines. Another aspect involves network models involving electric road systems, recharging electric vehicles, and refueling hydrogen-powered vehicles.
This work aims to help industry agents and government bodies meet net-zero emissions targets by decarbonising the transportation network and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels.
Areas of interest
- Agent-based modelling, self-organisation, sustainability, logistics, supply chain, operational research, statistical methodology, data analysis, software development, optimisation, combinatorics
Qualifications
- MMath Pure Mathematics (University of St Andrews, 2009)
- PhD Mathematics (Heriot-Watt University, 2014)
Background
Zoe received her PhD from Heriot Watt University for her thesis entitled 'Length Bounds for the Conjugacy Search Problem in Relatively Hyperbolic Groups, Limit Groups and Residually Free Groups'. Her mathematical interests include pure mathematics, group theory, combinatorics and statistics.
After her PhD, Zoe worked for National Records of Scotland, developing statistical methodology and building parts of the codebase for statistical data processing. Her specialties were data cleansing, edit and imputation, and statistical disclosure control.
Zoe is now back in academia as a Research Associate, focusing on the development of Java-based software in sustainable logistics modelling.
Zoe has a wide range of amateur academic interests, including physics, biochemistry, microbiology, forensics, languages and linguistics.