Elsa Silva is an Assistant Professor in the Production and Systems Department at the University of Minho. Since 2012, she has held a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Minho. Operations Research and Management Science are her main areas of scientific activity. Her research interests include solving hard and large-scale combinatorial optimization problems in various fields. Elsa Silva has made seminal contributions in the field of Cutting and Packing Problems, developing pioneering algorithms and combining mathematical models with heuristics to solve practical applications that have not been studied realistically in the past. She authored and co-authored +30 peer-reviewed papers. One of the publications was a finalist for the 2015 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, organised by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Another paper was runner-up for the 2019 Best Paper Prize of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) in the survey's category and selected as one of the 30 representative and influential papers in the ITOR's history selected by the Editor-in-Chief in the 30th Anniversary Selected Articles Special Issue. Elsa Silva supervised a Post-doc, two PhD Thesis, supervised (and co-) +10 MSc dissertations and mentored three PhD students. Regarding teaching activities, she has more than 10 years of experience and, in 2021, received a Diploma of Recognition of Pedagogical Merit from the School of Engineering at the University of Minho. She was a member of the organising committee of two international conferences and organised three stream sessions on EURO conferences. She has participated in the examination boards of six PhDs (three abroad) and 51 master's degrees (two abroad), written +50 peer reviews for international journals and served on the EURO/ROADEF challenge 2018 scientific committee. She is also a member of the editorial board of the bulletin of the Portuguese Association for Operational Research. She was awarded one PhD student Fellowship from FCT and one Post-doctoral Fellowship from FCT. Elsa Silva participated in preparing 16 applications of R&D projects, 9 of which as Principal Investigator and 5 submitted for funding by international agencies. She has coordinated/collaborated on 13 R&D projects in Business Management and Computer Science. She proposed/ collaborated on 19 R&D projects.