Ms. Sona Babu, a Research Scholar in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has received the Best Paper Award in the track “Simulation, Optimization and Productivity Improvement” for her paper titled “Hybrid Metaheuristics for Pareto-based Bi-objective Optimization in a JIT Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem” at the 5th IEOM India International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM 2025), held at VIT, Vellore, Tamil-Nadu, India, from November 6–8, 2025. She is pursuing her research under the supervision of Dr. B. S. Girish on developing computationally efficient scheduling algorithms for just-in-time manufacturing systems.