Winners of the 2026 POMS College of SCM Best Student Paper Competition

The organizing committee received 31 submissions for the 2026 POMS College of Supply Chain Management (SCM) Student Paper Competition. We thank all the participants for their submissions. We used a two-round process to select the winners for the competition. In the first round, each submission was evaluated by three reviewers who were experts in the paper's subject matter and had no conflict of interest. Chairs were not involved in the referee assignment of papers that they have conflict of interest. A total of four finalists were selected based on these evaluations. In the second round, each of the four finalists gave a paper presentation at a special session of the 2026 POMS Annual Conference, and their papers and presentation were evaluated by a panel of three faculty members. 

We congratulate the winners of this year's competition and thank all the first-round reviewers and the panel members whose names are attached at the end of this announcement for their service.

First Place (accompanied by a $750 honorarium): 
 Abolfazl Taghavi (University of California, Los Angeles): Preventing Catastrophic Wildfires: Annual Grid Inspection and Maintenance Plan

Runner-up (accompanied by a $500 honorarium): 
Mohammad Razzaghi (University of Houston): Do Not Look Far: Performance of Myopic Policies for Inventory Management at Retail Stores 

Finalists (accompanied by a $250 honorarium): 

Hamidreza Moshrefi (McGill University): Out-of-Stock, Out-of-Store? Estimating Cross-Store Fulfillment via Inferring Customer Journeys

Chuanshuai Ru ((Shanghai Jiao Tong University): Costless Multi-Party Signaling with Buyback Contracts in Supply Chain Finance

1st-round Reviewers: Anna Aminoff, Bin Hu, Christoph Bode, Collin Drent, Danja Sonntag, Fei Gao, Felix Papier, Frank Wiengarten, George Chen, Gerald Reiner, Gil Souza, Gokce Esenduran, Ioannis Stamatopoulos, Jelle de Vries, Jing Wu, Jiwen Ge, Joao Quariguasi, Frota Neto, Joel Goh, Joren Gijsbrechts, Mehmet Gumus, Melvin Drent, Michael Becker-Peth, Michael Kim, Neda Mirzaeian, Nesim Erkip, Niels Agatz, Paolo Letizia, Arne Strauss, Rob Zuidwijk, Rommert Dekker, Saibal Ray, Sanjith Gopalakrishnan, Stanley Lim, Stefan Minner, Suresh Muthulingam, Tao Lu, Tina Wakolbinger, Yann Bouchery, Yue Zhang, Zümbül Atan

2nd-round Panel Members: Pelin Pekgun, Joel Goh, Rob Basten