The purpose of organizing this list is to help graduate students find a summer school to gain skills related to operations research. Why? Because students are often unaware of those, whereas faculty are constantly bombarded by such announcements. And I cannot think of a better way to serve my academic community than doing this.
Some opportunities are targeted to undergraduate students (they are marked). In case you are not yet a PhD student but the topics of those schools are interesting to you, read more about applying to do a PhD with me or with my colleagues at University of Iowa.
By a summer school for this post, I understand an event that matches a reasonable number among the following criteria: (1) typically lasting from a couple of days to a couple of weeks; (2) not-for-profit organization; (3) some of the presenters are academics and not local; (4) the event is relevant to students interested in operations research; (5) the main activity is not having the participants presenting papers; (6) registration fees are reasonably priced for a student audience; and (7) the event happens between March and September of 2026:
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Winter School 2026: AI for Earth System, Hazards & Climate Extremes
March 16-20 (deadline was January 2)
Athens, Greece
Sustainable Life-Cycle of Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems (SAIL) Spring School: Resilience and AI
March 17-19 (deadline: January 5)
Padeborn, Germany
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Winter School on Foundation Models (FoMo) 2026
March 24-27 (deadline was December 14)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Simons Institute Workshop: Theoretical Foundations: From the Early Days of Neural Networks to the Modern Deep Learning Era
April 9-10 (deadline not posted)
Berkeley, CA, United States
International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization (ISCO) Spring School: Packing and Covering
May 4-5 (deadline: March 1 for early registration)
Kuşadası, Turkey
Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Power and Energy Systems (PES) Summer School 2026
May 18-22 (deadline: January 30)
Copenhagen, Denmark
Complex Networks: Theory, Methods, and Applications (early announcement)
May 18-22 (deadline not posted)
Como, Italy
Simons Institute Workshop: The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning
May 26-29 (deadline not posted)
Berkeley, CA, United States
23rd International Summer School for Advanced Studies on Biometrics, Behavior and Vision: Human Interactions and Large Foundation Models
June 8-12 (deadline: February 15)
Alghero, Italy
LANL Quantum Computing Summer School Fellowship
June 8 – August 14 (deadline: January 11)
Los Alamos, NM, United States
IPCO (Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization) 2026 Summer School
June 15-16 (deadline not posted)
Padova, Italy
Artificial Intelligence and Games: 8th International Summer School
June 15-19 (deadline not posted)
Leiden, The Netherlands
NATCOR Optimization Under Uncertainty
June 15-19 (deadline not posted)
Edinburgh, Scotland
Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL) Summer School
June 21-26 (deadline: January 30)
Stockholm, Sweeden
Numerical Computations: Theory and Algorithms (NUMTA) International Conference and Summer School
June 21-27 (deadline: April 1 for early registration)
Calabria, Italy
ICAPS (International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling) 2026 Summer School
June 22-25 (deadline not posted)
Dublin, Ireland
PCMI 2026 Graduate Summer School: Knotted Surfaces in Four-Manifolds
June 28 – July 18 (deadline: January 15)
Park City, UT, United States
Machine Learning Summer School on Reliability and Safety (MLSS^RS 2026)
June – July (dates to be defined)
Kraków, Poland
24rd Annual Wolfram Summer School
June – July (dates to be defined)
Waltham, MA, United States
[for undergraduate students]
2nd VeRoLog (EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization) PhD School (early announcement)
July 3-6 (deadline not posted)
Bath, England
EUROPT Conference on Advances in Continuous Optimization (EUROPT) Summer School 2026 (early announcement)
July 6-7 (deadline not posted)
Linz, Austria
The European Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (ESSAI)
July 6-10 (deadline not posted)
Vienna, Austria
Applied Bayesian Statistics Summer School on Interpretable Bayesian Learning for Physical and Engineering Sciences (early announcement)
July 6-10 (deadline not posted)
Como, Italy
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Summer School on Machine Learning for Healthcare and Biology
July 7-9 (deadline not posted)
Manchester, England
European Association for Data Science (EuADS) Summer School 2026: Data Science and Economics (early announcement)
July 8 – July 10 (deadline not posted)
Luxembourg
Bocconi & StatML Summer School in Advanced Statistics and Probability: 2026 Edition on Causality (early announcement)
July 8-17 (deadline not posted)
Como, Italy
Satisfiability (SAT), Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), and Automated Reasoning (AR) Summer School
July 13-17 (deadline not posted)
Lisbon, Portugal
British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) Computer Vision Summer School
July 13-17 (deadline: May 31 for early registration)
Durham, England
13th International Summer School on Deep Learning (DeepLearn 2026)
July 20-24 (deadline: January 5 for early registration)
Orléans, France
Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC 2026)
July 26 – August 7 (deadline not posted)
St. Charles, IL, United States
Gene Golub SIAM Summer School: Fault-Tolerant Algorithms in Quantum Computing
July 27 – August 7 (deadline: January 31)
Durham, NC, United States
Cambridge Ellis Unit Summer School 2026 (early announcement)
July (dates not defined)
Cambridge, England
International Conference on Bilevel Optimization (ICBO) 2026 (paywalled early announcement)
August 2 (deadline not posted)
Pittsburgh, PA, United States
NATCOR Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM)
September 7-11 (deadline not posted)
Portsmouth, England
EURO Summer/Winter Institute (ESWI) 2026: Data Driven Healthcare Under Uncertainty
September 20 – October 2
Aachen, Germany
Disclaimer
I do not vouch that all the information in this post is or will remain accurate, but I appreciate if you let me know if something is wrong. Moreover, if you know of other schools that are not listed here, please reach out to me ([first]-[last]@uiowa.edu). Like in previous semesters, I will keep updating this post and I may add some schools with past deadlines as reference for readers looking for schools in the next years. Here are the previous posts for reference: Summer 2016, Winter 2016 / 2017, Summer 2017, Winter 2017 / 2018, Summer 2018, Winter 2018 / 2019, Summer 2019, Winter 2019 / 2020, Summer 2020, (pandemic hiatus), Summer 2025, and Winter 2025 / 2026.
Thiago Serra 