Sebastian Sehmisch wins TRA Young Researchers Award 2026

We are happy to announce that Sebastian Sehmisch is the winner of the prestigious TRA Young Researchers Award 2026 in the category Rail. Sebastian received the award for his research on "Learning-based Problem Reduction for Real-Time Train Rescheduling in Station Areas", joint work with Tabish Haque, Christopher Szymula and Nikola Bešinović. The work is part of the REINFORCERAIL project and proposed a hybrid train rescheduling approach, combining machine learning and mathematical optimization to improve computational efficiency under real-time constraints.

Sebastian emerged as the winner in a highly competitive contest among talented young researchers from all around Europe. Second and third place went to Yuanchen Zeng (TU Delft) and Réka Kertész-Doffkay (Hungarian Institute for Transport Science and Logistics). The awards ceremony took place at the Transportation Research Arena 2026, May 18–21 in Budapest.