Portrait of Professor Jesse O’Hanley

Professor Jesse O’Hanley

Co-Investigator

About

Professor O’Hanley is the current Head of the Department of Analytics, Operations & Systems at Kent Business School. He is also a member of the Centre for Logistics and Heuristic Optimistation (CLHO), the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), and Global Challenges Doctoral Centre (GCDC).

Professor O’Hanley joined Kent Business School in 2006. He obtained both his BSc in Biological Sciences (with dept. honours) and his MSc in Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research from Stanford University. He earned his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy & Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prior to joining Kent, Professor O’Hanley worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford and before that was a management consultant to high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. He currently holds honorary positions at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), Oregon State University, and Imperial College London.

Professor O’Hanley is a member of the Committee of Professors of Operational Research (COPIOR), the OR Society, the EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Professor O’Hanley regularly gives invited lectures at leading UK and international universities and has served on various organising, scientific, and steering committees of international conferences and large research projects. He has refereed for dozens of leading academic journals and grant agencies in the fields of operational research, environmental management, and ecology.

Research interests

Professor O’Hanley’s research focuses on the development of optimisation and simulation techniques for environmental management, facility location, transportation, and logistics. He has written +60 articles and other publications covering a wide range of theoretical and applied topics, much of it highly interdisciplinary in nature. Recent work has appeared in leading field journals in operational research and environmental management, including the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Journal of Environmental Management, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), and Nature.

Recent and ongoing lines of inquiry include river connectivity enhancement, nature reserve selection, design of robust facility networks, managing vehicle/passenger flows, and climate change impacts analysis. Professor O’Hanley is the 2015 winner of the prestigious EURO Excellence in Practice Award in recognition for the development of a state-of-the-art decision support tool called OptiPass, which is being used in California, the Pacific Northwest, and other locations to plan on-the-ground river connectivity restoration actions.

Last updated 3 June 2021