Prof Sally Brailsford recognised with Beale Medal for her sustained contribution to Operational Research

Professor Sally Brailsford from Southampton Business School has been awarded the UK Operational Research Society’s 2024 Beale Medal.  This is the Society’s most prestigious medal, and gives recognition to a sustained contribution over many years to the theory, practice, or philosophy of Operational Research in the UK.

Sally is well known, both in the UK and worldwide, for her influential research on healthcare modelling, from evaluating treatments and screening programmes to redesigning and improving service delivery and resource allocation. She is still the only three-time winner of the OR Society’s Goodeve Medal (awarded annually for the best paper published in the Journal of the OR Society), winning the medal in 2004, 2006 and 2015.

Sally has taken on many leadership roles that promote OR research, including serving as vice-president of the OR Society from 2006 to 2008, and vice-president of EURO (the Association of European OR Societies) from 2012 to 2015.  From 2010-19 she was chair of the EURO Working Group on OR Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) and was one of the founding editors-in-chief of the OR Society journal Health Systems.  She is a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Simulation, and has served on both the editorial boards for Health Care Management Science and Operations Research for Health Care.  In 2016 she was made a Companion of OR by the OR Society in recognition of her contribution to health OR.

In response to the award, Sally says: “I am hugely honoured to have received this award, which is a testament to the support I have received over my many years at Southampton. I am also delighted that we now have two Beale Medal winners in the family, as my husband Chris (Potts) was awarded the medal in 2022.”