Yuming Sun, a Ph.D. student studying Operations Research at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been honored with the 2023 Seth Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services.

The Seth Bonder scholarship is a prestigious student award in the INFORMS Health Applications Society, that promotes the development and application of process modeling and operations research analysis to healthcare design, delivery, and operations.

Officially unveiled on Sunday, October 15th at the INFORMS Annual Meeting Awards Banquet, Sun was recognized for his exceptional research addressing the urgent need to focus on the threats posed by “circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus” (cVDPV).

Pioneering Solutions in Polio Eradication

Sun’s research proposal emphasized the ongoing challenges in reducing polio transmission on a global scale and mitigating vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks -- offering hope for a polio-free world.

His work consists of modeling the spread of poliovirus in high-risk spaces, while investigating cost-effective options to stop, prevent, and end polio outbreaks.

“Vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks are a result of the live-attenuated viruses used in the oral polio vaccine (OPV) reverting to cVDPV in under-vaccinated communities. cVDPV leads to poliovirus transmission and potentially paralysis among infected individuals.”

A Visionary Collaboration

With his research advancement, Sun emerges as a trailblazer, potentially being the first ISyE student in over two decades to receive this revered award.

Under the guidance of his advisors, Pinar Keskinocak and Lauren Steimle, Sun has “closely collaborated with researchers in the Global Immunization Division at the CDC, and regularly incorporates their feedback into his models.”

The invaluable feedback from the CDC team has enriched the impact, positioning Yuming at the forefront of this critical research.

Aguirre’s primary interests revolve around tackling challenges in the domains of Causal Inference, Personalized Medicine, and Medical Decision-Making. He is grateful to be advised by Dr. Turgay Ayer and Dr. Gian-Gabriel Garcia, and his work aims to advance the field of machine learning in healthcare.

Joseph Boone, a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award, is interested in game theoretic optimization, logistics in contested environments, supply chain and infrastructure network resiliency, and applied statistics and simulation for risk-aware system design.

His primary research goals involve developing methods to solve complex, multilevel optimization problems that arise in optimizing supply chain and infrastructure networks against worst-case or adversarial disruptions. Joseph aspires to apply these methods in various fields, including military logistics, equity in healthcare, and disaster relief efforts.

Alina Gorbunova, a recipient of the NSF GRFP, focuses her research on systems monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics using high-dimensional and high-variety data with machine learning and data analytics techniques.

Her research interests lie in creating a scalable causation-based quality improvement framework. This framework aims to monitor, diagnose, and control multistage manufacturing systems by leveraging high-dimensional and high-variety data. Gorbunova's work contributes to advancing the field of quality improvement in manufacturing systems through the application of machine learning and data analytics.

Engineers who are performing exceptional research and technical work in a variety of disciplines will come together for the two-and-a-half-day event. The participants — from the industry, academia, and government — were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations.  

Ayer also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School. 

Ayer's contributions to the field have also led to his role as a senior advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as his position as an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science, and MSOM. Additionally, he has served as the past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. 

His research focuses on healthcare analytics and socially responsible business analytics with a particular emphasis on practice-focused research. His research papers have been published in top tier management, engineering, and medical journals; along with being covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR. 

The symposium will be hosted by the University of Colorado, Boulder, September 10-13, 2023, and will explore four themes: 

•     Engineered Quantum Systems 

•     Mining and Mineral Resource Production 

•     Resilience and Security in the Information Ecosystem 

•     Complex Systems in the Context of Health Care 

Since the program’s inception in 1995, more than 5,000 early-career engineers have participated in previous symposia, many of whom have gone on to become national leaders in the engineering community. Georgia Tech is proud to partner with organizations like The Grainger Foundation to promote a vibrant engineering profession and public appreciation of engineering. 

Read the article in its entirety within the Scientific American website.

Keskinocak has long served as a leader with the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). A fellow with the institute, she has served as president, vice president of membership and professional recognition, and is the co-founder and former president of the INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.

At Georgia Tech she has also served as the College of Engineering Advance Professor for six years and was a leading voice over the past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to working with the Georgia Department of Public Health, she served on the Institute’s Covid task force helping to establish an institutional approach to the pandemic.

“It’s an honor, first of all, to have had the opportunity to serve,” she said. “Our communities at Georgia Tech and beyond are wonderful, so to be recognized among all of these outstanding contributors is a great honor.”

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the application of operations research and management science with society impact, particularly regarding health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics. She is the director of ISyE’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Recent work has focused on infectious disease modeling in response to Covid-19.

Read more about Keskinocak’s latest research here: New Study Shows Hybrid Learning Led to Significant Reduction in Covid-19 Spread

A new study published in BMC Public Health shows that hybrid learning utilizing alternating school days for children offers a significant reduction in community disease spread. Total closure in favor of remote learning, however, offers little additional advantage over that hybrid option.

This research will help decision-makers in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak or one from a similar infectious disease.

“Early in the pandemic when school closures were becoming the norm, many debated the pros and cons of this measure,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and Professor in ISyE and the principal investigator on the study. “Do we get enough benefit to offset the social costs and impacts on education? This research shows that there is a benefit in infection reduction, especially in the absence of effective pharmaceutical interventions, and most of the benefits can be attained with a hybrid approach.”

This study is particularly relevant for the early days of an infectious disease outbreak when policymakers face the difficult decision of enacting school closures in their respective districts. Using an agent-based simulation model of Covid-19 spread, researchers projected the impact of various school reopening strategies: complete closure, alternating school days where one cohort attended in person twice a week and another cohort on the opposite days, younger children only, and regular (i.e. all students return to in-person learning).

Results showed that compared to schools reopening with regular attendance, the percentage of the population infected reduced by 13, 11, 9, and 6 percent with each respective strategy. The conclusions were that some level of closure – younger children only, alternating days, and completely remote – offers significant reduction in community-wide infections. The benefit of complete closure over a hybrid approach, however, was minimal.

The assumption in all cases was that individuals who contracted the virus would remain at home.

“The additional benefit of complete school closure compared to hybrid was relatively small,” Keskinocak said. “The implementation of an alternating day model can be challenging but could have public health benefits early in the pandemic or during a new wave, providing social and learning benefits as well.”

Other challenges remain that were not investigated in this particular research – costs on families in the event of school closures, learning tradeoffs, properly equipping students for virtual learning, and others. This is just one element of many for policymakers to consider, Keskinocak said.

CITATION: Arden Baxter, Buse Eylul Oruc, John Asplund, Pinar Keskinocak, Nicoleta Serban. Evaluating Scenarios for School Reopening under Covid-19. BMC Public Health. March 14, 2022.  https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12910-w

In addition to participating in the honors and awards banquet, Nazzal’s award will be published in the ISE magazine, as well as be featured on the IISE website.

The award is for developing an early design course, titled Cornerstone Design, which focuses on “framing the problem” without solving it. 

“The course lays out the foundation for design thinking using a project‐based learning approach, interactive sessions with instructors, and a goldmine of past capstone senior design projects that ISyE has kept for years organized in a database,” Nazzal explained. “That includes all the relevant data files, original team notes, deliverables, and code.”

Design aims to address the engineering design skill gaps by offering a learning environment that utilizes multiple past capstone senior design projects complemented with lessons on key engineering design and industrial engineering principles, Nazzal said of the study.

“Through multiple diverse projects, students develop the skill to structure the way they approach complex undefined problems that are fraught with data gaps, uncertainty and ambiguity in objectives, and conflicting priorities,” she said. “Students learn how to communicate the motivation effectively and succinctly for solving a problem and the scientific evidence supporting their design solution hypothesis.”

Nazzal has additional research that focuses on the control of discrete event logistics systems such as distribution systems, healthcare delivery systems, and manufacturing systems.

Current Ph.D. students Arden Baxter and Daniel Kim join Akane Fujimoto and Melike Yildirim as admits to the ORISE Research Participation Program at the CDC, an educational and training program designed to provide college students, recent graduates, and university faculty opportunities to connect with the center’s unique resources.

“These are all such fantastic students,” said William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak, advisor to all four students. “It’s a competitive program and for all four to be recognized in consecutive years, it says a lot about their work.”

Baxter, who will graduate in the summer, plans to join the ORISE program immediately and work with the CDC for the next year. Her work has included Covid-19 disease modeling and evaluating intervention strategies, as well as modeling for decision-making in humanitarian systems such as emergency response for resource coordination.

Kim will take a year off for the fellowship before returning to finish his thesis. He, too, has recent work on Covid-19. Other work includes incentive mechanisms to increase post-disaster debris recycling and analysis of data on mental health medication prescribed to children.

Fujimoto will complete the ORISE program this summer and return to ISyE to finish her Ph.D., with research focusing on various topics in health systems, including pre-natal screening for Down syndrome and Covid-19 modeling and dashboards..

Yildirim finished her degree in Jan. 2021, took a postdoctoral position at Harvard, and then joined the ORISE program in Dec. 2021.

The awards are sponsored by both alumni and corporate partners, among others. To learn how to get involved, contact ISyE’s Senior Director of Development Nancy Sandlin at nancy.sandlin@isye.gatech.edu.

Explore all award winners below.

Graduate Awards for Excellence in Research

The Shabbir Ahmed Research Excellence Award

Jiaming Liang (Optimization)

Sebastian Perez-Salazar (Optimization)

The Atlanta Air Cargo Association Research Excellence Award

Jana Boerger (Supply Chain Engineering)

The Robert Goodell Brown Research Excellence Award

Liyan Xie (Data Science and Statistics)

The Anderson-Interface Research Excellence Award

Amin Gholami (Energy and Sustainable Systems)

The Thos and Clair Muller Research Excellence Award

Zhaowei She (Health Analytics and Health Systems)

The Angela P. and Reed J. Baker Research Excellence award

Jialei Chen (Advanced Manufacturing and SIAC)

The Margaret and Stephen Kendrick Research Excellence Award

Keyu Zhu (Analytics and Machine Learning)

The Ed Iacobucci Research Excellence Awarc

Daniela Hurtado-Lange (Applied Probability and Simulation)

Additional Graduate Awards

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor of the Year Award

Shangcong Mou

Tyler Perini

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year Award

Xinyu Liu

ISyE Outstanding Master’s Teaching Assistant of the Year Award

Lucienne Loo

The Phillip J. and Delores A. Scott Graduate Student Health and Wellness Award

Nidhima Grover

Miguel Campos Murcia

Katja Meuche

Vinaya Krishna

Ritesh Ojha

Yassin Watson

Undergraduate Awards

ISyE Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year Award

Pratyush Agrawal

Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Excellence in Leadership Award

Dany Shwayri

The Evelyn Pennington Outstanding Service Awards

Duncan Siebert

Hung Doan

The Evelyn Pennington Student Health and Wellness Award

Noah Mitchem

Christina Collins

Elizabeth Schupp

Quentin Mot

ISyE Alpha Pi Mu Academic Excellence Award

Oscar Aguilar

Xufei Liu

COE Honors Day Award

Zhiyi Li

COE Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

Madeleine Pollack

Adam Profili

Kurt Salmon Associate Scholarship in Industrial and Systems Engineering

Maxim Geller

Michael Cho

Hope Williams

Fuad Hossain

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Entrepreneurship Award

Christophoros Kontomaris

Min Sol Lee

Nicolas & Aurora Suarez Condezo International Award

Dewang Agarwal

Li, also core faculty in the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, currently focuses on the developments of machine learning algorithms for precision medicine specifically with regards to the brain. She leverages collaborations with radiologists and neurologists to investigate brain diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and post-traumatic headache after brain injury.

Today, technology advances have produced more data than ever before, imaging, genomics, mobile health data, etc., which allow researchers to develop more personalized algorithms for diagnosis and prognosis.

“What disease do they have? How severe is it? How will the disease change in the future? Are they on the track of recovery, or are they going to get worse,” Li said.

Using the available datasets from imaging, genomics, clinical records, and mobile apps & wearables, they are building personalized models for diagnosis and treatment in each of these areas that can lead to early detection and more effective outcomes.

Ayer, who also holds an appointment from Emory Medical School and serves as a senior advisor to CDC, focuses on health care analytics and socially responsible business analytics with an emphasis on practice-focused research. In recent work, he has attempted to build up more robust and effective virtual trials for medical screening, diagnosis and treatment using large-scale mathematical models.

If you look at the gold standard in medicine and clinical science – randomized control trials – it generally utilizes A/B testing strategies. But what if there are thousands of strategies to compare, not just Strategy A and Strategy B?

“In a recent study, we looked at multi-modality cancer screening strategies for cancer detection in gene mutation carriers,” Ayer said. “You ask questions like: Should you use ultrasound screening or MRI screening? How about mammography screening? Or maybe mammography plus ultrasound screening? At what age should you start – 25 to 30? Or 35?

“At what age should you transfer from a less intensive screening to another? Is that cost effective? And what if we are solving this problem for the United States versus sub-Saharan Africa where resources are more limited? There are millions and billions of scenarios, and you can’t design a randomized control trial that would effectively compare those.”

Ayer’s work has spanned long-term chronic disease, both communicable and non-communicable – diseases like COVID-19 for the former and different cancers for the latter.

Both Li and Ayer said the chair appointment would assist in their work.

“It’s a great honor and recognition,” Li said. “I think going forward this will help me to pursue bigger efforts and initiatives, engaging people with a variety of expertise. This research needs collaboration across different descriptions. ”

“It helps to bring more visibility to the work,” Ayer echoed. “This will also help us scale up the resources that we have within our communities and reach out to more collaborators.”

“It was wonderful to see the senior design students develop and present their projects in person. They endured another stressful semester, but remarkably balanced quality and rigor with health and wellbeing,” said Director of Professional Practice Dima Nazzal. “Kudos to them for overcoming the challenges and delivering excellent work for a wide range of clients including government agencies, small non-profits, and large corporations. Congratulations to the faculty advisors, who coached the teams and kept them motivated and focused. A special recognition and appreciation to our Director of Technical Communication, Brandy Blake, for teaching the students how to communicate their engineering designs clearly and succinctly”

Senior Design team “Provision with a Vision” won the Capstone Expo award for Best ISyE Project. They worked with the on-board services group at Delta Air Lines to develop a data-driven methodology that determines the optimal amount of beverage items to load on a flight. The project motivation came from unused items adding extra weight to the aircraft resulting in excess fuel costs and carbon emissions. The team delivered an optimization model that takes into consideration passenger demand as well as an impact analysis tool which allows Delta to visualize how small changes in beverage quantities can have significant economic and environmental impact across the system.

The team included Anneliese Conrad, Carolina Howell, Niral Jagtap, Ellie Johnson, Nico Knutzen, Sofia Laval, Brad Peterson, and Libbee Stallone. They were advised by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt.

From among the ISyE teams, three were selected as finalists for the Best of ISyE Senior Design Competition, which was held on December 14, 2021. Team “Shoulda Put A R(INGO)n i(T)” was selected as the first-place winner.

Team “Shoulda Put A R(INGO)n i(T)” partnered with Novelis, an aluminum manufacturing company, to improve ingot availability in its Oswego, NY, facility. The goal of the project was to ensure that when a customer makes an order, Novelis could supply the right ingots at the right time on hand to immediately start production. The team’s solution was to build an ingot “supermarket” that would increase ingot availability from 50% to 90% and reduce overall lead time by up to 40%. To achieve this, the team created an optimization model that recommended the best replenishment strategy for each ingot SKU and used a simulation model to measure the impact of the supermarket on the production process. With this new tool, Novelis can dramatically increase their operational efficiency and save millions of dollars per year.

Team Members included Tobin Abraham, Joseph Abrokwa, Elvin Chirackal, Joseph Cochran, Lorenzo Guerrero, Grace Anne Muller, and Tim Ryan. They were advised by Part-Time Lecturer and Tennenbaum Institute Principal Research Engineer Douglas Bodner.

Finalist team “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Bus Stop” worked with the Atlanta Department of Transportation (ATLDOT), a recently formed government entity tasked with promoting transportation infrastructure. The team worked to provide ATLDOT with a data-driven methodology to allocate funding to bus stop improvements and a platform for closer collaboration with MARTA. Only 7% of bus stops (out of nearly 4,000) in Atlanta have shelters, which provide riders with proper seating, protection from weather, and ADA accessibility. The team’s solution combines process design with an interactive web tool and a greedy heuristic web app. Through the team’s solution, an additional 1.5 million trips per year will now originate at a sheltered stop. The City of Atlanta voted to back the project with a $3.4 million non-fungible funding source, and the team will present their design to the new mayor in January.

Team members included Soobin Baek, Aaron Brown, Ananya Ghose, Sanghwa Lee, Sung Kyu Lee, Alea Legg, Hetu Patel, Tejas Santanam. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Finalist team “Keep it Simply” worked with The Coca-Cola Company to minimize the overall cost of the distribution network of two recently acquired dairy brands: Fairlife and Simply Oat & Almond. The team provided a data-driven method of formulating network expansion plans and determining safety stock levels by building and validating a mathematical optimization model that recommends not only the optimal distribution center (DC) opening location and timeline, but also the capacity expansion and safety stock level at each DC over a given horizon. This provided an annual value of several million dollars across the two dairy brands. To help Coca-Cola design the network expansion of any brand in the future, the team generalized the model to a standardized template wrapped within a user-friendly graphical user interface with three different model options.

Team Members included Joseph Chanin, Yizhi Huang, Minrui Liang, Yufei Liu, Naren Reddy, Xinran Yu, and Emily Zhang. They were advised by Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Alejandro Toriello.

In addition, two teams received honorable mentions and were contenders for the Best of ISyE Senior Design.

Team “Panic! at the Cisco” worked with Cisco on its Printed Circuit Board Assembly Component Allocation. Team Members included Anjana Anandkumar, Udisha Bhattacharyya, Grace Gilpatric, Katie Landers, Kat Pospichel, Briana Sims, Tan Tanthien, and Anna (Tu) Vu. They were advised by William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak.

Team “The Bee’s Knees” worked with Smith + Nephew on its production planning. Team Members included Leon Breaux, Sara Costello, Emma Jones, James McGregor, Georgia Warnock, and Delaney Wastler. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Ethan Lee.

“I am truly grateful and humbled for this huge honor,” said Keskinocak. “I am thankful to all my colleagues, students, friends, and family who have supported me and many others over the years, and it is the greatest gift for me to support others, even if only in a small way.”

Throughout her career, Keskinocak has been a leader in her field and has advocated for the advancement of women and minorities in engineering. She is an INFORMS Fellow, has served as president of INFORMS and the WORMS Forum, established the WORMS Award, and served as the co-founder and president of the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group to help junior faculty develop their networks and grow professionally. During her term as INFORMS president, she helped further diversity, equity, and inclusion within the organization. She also spearheaded the establishment of a DEI Ambassadors Program to create a culture of inclusivity for all members within the INFORMS community.

At Georgia Tech, Keskinocak is the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, and she has served as a College of Engineering (COE) ADVANCE Professor and interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. She has also made significant contributions to numerous programs at COE and the Institute, which include the Demystifying Tech Series, Adaptive Leadership Workshop, and Diversity and Inclusion Fellows Program. In addition, she was instrumental in the establishment of the COE diversity and inclusion council, resume speed meeting workshops, and other initiatives focused on equity, diversity, and excellence.

Keskinocak has made a lasting impression on many of the people she has worked with.

“I don’t know how my career and life would have turned out had I not had the chance to meet and work with Dr. Keskinocak,” said one person in their nomination letter. “I do know how grateful I am I did have that chance. She is and always will be a role model for me in servant leadership, an extraordinary mentor, and an exceptional teacher.”

“I am just an example of all the lives and careers of women in OR/MS who Pinar has touched, as an advisor, as a professor, as a colleague, and as a leader and role model in OR/MS,” said another. “Pinar represents exactly what this award is about.”

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling — including significant work related to the Covid-19 pandemic — and evaluating intervention strategies and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; and disaster preparedness and response.

With innovative research projects in healthcare, it is no surprise Arden Baxter received a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Her work in humanitarian logistics explores how to allocate scarce resources to meet the most demand, specifically in disaster management scenarios where different resource types must work in coordination.

“In a hurricane setting, you could have flooding in an area but also people who are hurt and need EMS [emergency medical services], necessitating coordination between water rescue services and EMS to get those people out of their homes and treated,” Baxter explained.

She has also been involved in disease modeling for Covid-19, studying the benefits and consequences of nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as voluntary quarantine and school closure, and how they affected the people who were homebound.

“I knew that I wanted to do something where I felt like I was making a difference,” said Baxter. “I've always had this passion for service, and operations research is a great way to combine math and service into one.”

HENRY YUCHI // Ph.D. student, Machine Learning

After studying at the University of Cambridge to earn his undergraduate and master’s degrees in engineering, Henry Yuchi was drawn to Georgia Tech by the diversity of ISyE research and his interest in the interface of engineering, data science, and statistics.

“Across the country, and Europe as well, it is very rare to find a data science or machine learning program in the engineering department,” said Yuchi.

He is studying low-rank matrix completion as well as computer experiments with multiple mesh density variables — work that earned him a student paper award from the American Statistical Association. His research tackles the engineering problem of using computer simulation software to separate a very large model into mesh cells, or boxes, to make estimates of items such as flow speed and velocity.

“I’m trying to find a scheme where we can use different sizes of cells to run different experiments, then combine all the solutions together to improve the accuracy of the experiments, while using fewer computational resources,” Yuchi explained.

JIALEI CHEN // Ph.D. 2021, Industrial Engineering

Jialei Chen has been a research assistant at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, taking part in interdisciplinary research focused on data analytics and its applications to manufacturing and healthcare. One of his projects, a collaboration with Piedmont Heart Institute, proposes a surgical planning framework to treat aortic stenosis, a severe heart disease caused by the narrowing of the aortic valve. The current procedure, which involves inserting a stent, is a standardized treatment with limited customization.

“Our ambition is to personalize this surgery procedure for the specific patient,” said Chen. “We try to understand through computer simulations and 3D printing experiments which surgery procedure is the best for the patient.”

His work across multiple research areas has earned him the Ellis R. Ott Scholarship from the American Society for Quality, as well as many first-place awards at student paper competitions. Now that his Ph.D. is completed, he will continue his path in academia as an assistant professor in the department of statistics at the University of Georgia.

The dashboard was developed by a team from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), including Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and professor, and Dima Nazzal, Director of Professional Practice. They worked alongside Ph.D. students Akane Fujimoto and Tyler Perini in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH).

“There is a lot variability in different regions of the state, so we wanted to take a closer look from an equity perspective,” said Keskinocak in the article.

As of June 3, the dashboard indicated that vaccination rates among white residents are higher than those of Black residents in all large metro counties as well as around 70% of all Georgia counties. In addition, vaccination coverage among adults was lower among those living in counties with lower socioeconomic status and with higher percentages of households with children, single parents, and persons with disabilities.

You can read the entire article about their findings here.

The study was conducted collaboratively by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina (UNC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU). This includes Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), as well as Julie Swann, department head of North Carolina State University’s Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Researchers evaluated how many Covid-19 cases could be avoided in North Carolina if more people get vaccinated and continue to follow mask and physical distancing guidelines. They used an agent-based model originally developed at Georgia Tech for pandemic flu that was later adapted to Covid-19 and modified to test additional scenarios.

“The main takeaway from the paper is that while the increasing vaccine coverage in the U.S. has a positive impact, we are not really there yet. We still need to follow preventive measures such as mask wearing,” said Keskinocak in the article.

Swann concurred, saying, “Current variants are more infectious, and there are still locations with less than 30% of the population vaccinated.”

You can read more about their findings here.

Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation Early Career Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), is part of a research team that received funds from the first round of grants. The Foundation recognized the work of Ayer and ISyE Ph.D. student Jade Yingying Xiao, along with their partners from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital – led by Assistant Professor Jagpreet Chhatwal, and Boston Medical Center – led by Associate Professor Benjamin Linus.

Last spring as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States, this multi-institutional team devised the widely used Covid-19 Simulator, which helps inform public health responses to the pandemic on the state and local level. (The simulator website includes other tools created by the team, including an outbreak detection tool and an immunity detector, which shows the proportion of each state’s population with Covid-19 antibodies.)

With the Accelerator grant, Ayer’s team will broaden the Simulator’s impact to inform the timing of each state’s lifted restrictions and a gradual return to normal activities. The Simulator’s recommendations are based on Covid-19 vaccination rates, as well as the new Covid-19 variants that are cause for concern.

“The Covid-19 Simulator mimics current Covid-19 epidemiology and pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions, including public health policies, at the state level,” said Ayer. “With the rapid uptake of vaccines in the United States, the estimations from Covid-19 Simulator show that we could go back to life on a near-normal basis by the end of 2021 or early 2022.”

Throughout his career, Ayer has worked on healthcare analytics, creating models to help slow the spread of various infectious diseases, including Hepatitis C. He also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

• Anne Schuchat, MD, RADM, USPHS, Principal Deputy Director, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)
• Michelle Nunn, MPA, President and CEO, CARE USA
• Sanjay Gupta, MD, Chief Medical Correspondent, CNN; Staff Neurosuregon, Emory Clinic (to interview Michelle Nunn)

KEYNOTE BIOS

Dr. Anne Schuchat has spent almost 30 years in public health, in leadership roles at the CDC, the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID) and the Center for Global health. She will share her experience working across Africa on meningitis, pneumonia, Ebola vaccine trials, surveillance and prevention projects, as well as in China on Beijing's SARS emergency response, and the importance of collaboration in building strong supply chains and health systems around the world.

Michelle Nunn has spent 25 years in civic and public service, as a social entrepreneur, a nonprofit CEO and a candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Michelle will share reflections on CARE’s work fighting global poverty and providing lifesaving assistance in emergencies such as the Syrian refugee crisis, and ongoing turmoil in Yemen and Sudan, as well as disaster response efforts in places affecting by natural disasters due to El Niño.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta is the multiple Emmy award winning chief medical correspondent for CNN. Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon, plays an integral role in CNN's reporting on health and medical news for all of CNN's shows domestically and internationally, and contributes to CNN.com. His medical training and public health policy experience distinguishes his reporting from war zones and natural disasters, as well as on a range of medical and scientific topics, including the recent Ebola outbreak, brain injury, disaster recovery, health care reform, fitness, military medicine, and HIV/AIDS. Additionally, Dr. Gupta is the host of Vital Signs for CNN International and Accent Health for Turner Private Networks.

CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

The 2016 HHL Conference will feature plenary panels and interactive workshops on a variety of topics related to supply chain management and logistics in global health and humanitarian response and development, as well as a Technology Exhibit, poster sessions on innovative research, and ample opportunities for networking. Information on speakers, panel topics, health and humanitarian site visits will be available soon at: chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2016. You may register now for the conference at: chhs.gatech.edu/conference/registration/. *See note below on registration reimbursement

Plenary panel topics will focus on the below topics.

• Strengthening Public Health Systems
• Managing Complex Supply Chains in Refugee Crisis Response
• Matching Supply with Demand in Emergency Response

The 2016 conference is made possible by generous support from the UPS Foundation (now for the 8th year). TO SPONSOR THE 2016 CONFERENCE, please contact Meghan Smithgall at msmithgall@isye.gatech.edu. 

We hope you will join us in August!

*Note that the first two registrants from an NGO (for example, the first two employees from UNHCR (from any country) or other NGO) may apply for reimbursement of the registration fee following the conference. Only current degree students with accepted posters are eligible for limited financial assistance and registration reimbursement ($250 for travel within U.S. and $500 if traveling from outside of U.S. Click here for details). There is no other financial assistance or scholarship available for conference participants.

Director of Professional Practice Dima Nazzal is responsible for project-based learning in ISyE, including the Capstone Senior Design program. She has been awarded one of two Curriculum Innovation Awards, which recognizes faculty “who are improving the quality of education at Georgia Tech through pedagogical and curricular innovation.” Nazzal specifically received the award for her development of the ISyE Cornerstone Design course.

The Cornerstone Design class – first offered in the Fall 2018 semester – is an early design course focusing on framing a problem without solving it. The course lays the foundation for design thinking using a project-based learning approach, interactive problem-solving sessions, and the goldmine of past Senior Design Capstone projects from past years that ISyE has kept organized in a database.

Nazzal has explained that the goal of the class is for students to develop, through multiple diverse projects, key design skills, such as how to develop a solution hypothesis from a vague need by methodically dissecting the problem and analyzing relevant information. Students learn that there is not one way to solve a design problem because design generally involves tradeoffs between competing objectives under uncertainty. They work in teams with a rotating leadership role, so each student experiences the challenges and rewards of being a project leader. They learn how to effectively and succinctly communicate the motivation for solving a problem and the scientific evidence supporting their design solution hypothesis.

“We realized that we need to have a proactive approach to addressing the design skill gaps we see in our students during their Senior Design projects,” Nazzal said. “Some faculty have cynically said, ‘In Senior Design, we’re throwing the students into the water to learn how to swim.’ We introduced Cornerstone Design to teach our students to not only survive the deep waters of design problems but also to skillfully navigate the turbulence as well. Cornerstone Design has a set of simple and inexpensive features that have proven to be effective and replicable. I am honored to receive this recognition, and I look forward to continue working with my colleagues to improve and innovate."

“Being the No. 1-ranked industrial engineering program in the U.S. makes ISyE a leader in curriculum development. Cornerstone Design structure and content is readily available to any industrial engineering department that is looking to expand its curriculum – and consequently their student – development,” Nazzal added.

Previously, Nazzal received the 2015 Georgia Tech Women in Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award.

A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck received the 2021 Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching, which “recognizes a full-time faculty member for strong commitment to engaged online teaching and student success.”

When the Covid-19 pandemic caused Georgia Tech to move instruction online last March, Van Hentenryck successfully pivoted his courses to the changed format. This also included shifting the Seth Bonder Camp for Computational and Data Science, offered for middle and high school students, to a virtual configuration, which he was then able to offer twice last summer.

“We tried to make the courses entertaining and offer personalized attention to each and every student, knowing they would spend most of their days in front of a monitor,” Van Hentenryck said. “We learned so many things. Of course, I am more than delighted to receive this award: It is additional motivation to keep improving.”

In winning the Institute’s Teaching Excellence Award, Van Hentenryck will be this year’s Institute nominee for the Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award from the University System of Georgia. He has also been the recipient of numerous teaching honors, including the 2020 Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award.

Nazzal and Van Hentenryck will be recognized at the April 15^th Faculty & Staff Honors Celebration, which will be virtual this year.

Keskinocak has focused her career on heath and humanitarian systems, including hospital operations management, infectious disease modeling, and evaluating the effectiveness of intervention strategies. Since the initial coronavirus outbreak, she has worked on developing a comprehensive agent-based disease spread model, in collaboration with ISyE Professor Nicoleta Serban and Ph.D. students Buse Eylul Oruc, Arden Baxter, and others. The model estimates the spread of the disease geographically and over time; resource needs such as hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators; and enables the team to evaluate the impact of various intervention scenarios to determine the best course of action.

In a recent CNN interview, Keskinocak discusses the impact of social distancing and current shelter in place orders. She cautions that a careful, gradual approach is needed as society plans to go back to work and social life, a balancing act between public health and the economy. She emphasizes the importance of the need to continue social distancing to slow down COVID-19 spread, flatten the curve, and save lives.

View the recording of “Analytics for Infectious Disease Control” via YouTube

We would love your feedback! Please complete this quick survey to help our future webinars.

This was the fourth webinar of a series on the value of applying analytics to real-world problems. These webinars are an initiative of the INFORMS Practice Section, and you are welcomed to join here.

If you would like to present in this webinar series send your information to:

Dr. Patricia Neri (patricianerib@gmail.com) or Dr. Carrie Beam (carrie@carriebeamconsulting.com).

The Practice Section is currently working on the fifth webinar in the series.  Check back here for updates!

Now Keskinocak has been called on to lend her expertise to the Committee on Addressing Issues of Vaccine Distribution and Supply Chains to Advance Pandemic and Seasonal Influenza Preparedness and Response. This ad hoc committee formed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will examine “supply chain and distribution challenges related to vaccines and vaccinations during the COVID-19 response and explore their implications for pandemic and seasonal influenza.” 

Among other responsibilities, the committee will review pandemic vaccine manufacturing during the H1N1, SARS, Ebola, and Covid-19 outbreaks; identify critical gaps in vaccine delivery on both a regional and global basis; and examine how Covid-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution may have important implications for the manufacture and distribution of flu vaccines.

Closer to home, Keskinocak serves on Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera’s Recovery Task Force, a group of leaders from across campus formed to help guide the Institute’s eventual return to normal – and safe – operations. The task force has been modeling different return scenarios using guidelines set forth by federal and state public health agencies, as well as the University System of Georgia. In March, Institute leadership announced plans for the Fall 2021 semester to see resumption of fully normal operations.

Keskinocak, who is also the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech, has dedicated her career to the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications and supply chain management. Most recently she has focused her efforts on vaccine distribution and infectious disease modelling during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic highlighted the weaknesses in many of our ‘systems’ like never before. Its impact, similar to many other previous disasters, has been disproportionately high on vulnerable or underserved populations,” Keskinocak said in the article.

“When we prepare for or respond to a complex emergency, we need the public and the private sectors to speedily coordinate, with all players understanding what is needed from them, when, and where, so that we achieve synergies, providing resources and services that are the right place at the right time. This requires coordination on a national and sometimes global scale, which has been lacking in many of the complex emergencies in the past, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

You can read the entire article about Keskinocak’s work here.

Using data from the state of Georgia, the study determined that a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions, with various levels of compliance that change over time, could in some instances cut cumulative infections in half and reduce the peak number of infections to about a third of what could have been seen, “flattening the peak” to avoid overwhelming a state’s healthcare system. 

You can read a complete analysis of the ISyE team's findings here.

One such researcher was Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). He has focused his career on health care analytics and has created models to help slow the spread of various infectious diseases, including Hepatitis C. He also serves as the research director for health care analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

Along with ISyE Ph.D. student Jade Yingying Xiao, Ayer partnered with a research team from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Assistant Professor Jagpreet Chhatwal, and a team from Boston Medical Center, led by Associate Professor Benjamin Linas. Together this group created the COVID-19 Simulator. The simulator, an interactive tool designed to inform COVID-19 intervention policy decisions in the U.S., is also available to the general public. It evaluates the impact of different social distancing interventions on the reduction in spread of coronavirus in the U.S., on both a national and state level.

“We have leveraged our previous expertise in epidemiological and infectious disease modeling, from a model-building perspective,” explained Ayer. “However, we could not utilize our knowledge from any other diseases in terms of the spread of this virus because it is so different. The speed at which the virus spreads from one person to another and how long an infected individual can be asymptomatic — these values are unique to COVID-19. We needed to dig deeper into the literature and observed statistics to parameterize the model.”

In early March, many states in the U.S. began implementing social distancing practices — which included limiting social gatherings, staying six feet away from others, wearing masks in public, closing schools and businesses, teleworking, and other measures to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread of the disease. The COVID-19 simulator is designed to predict the outcomes of the various levels of social distancing to help policy makers make educated decisions when lifting the various restrictions and give individuals information to determine their own actions going forward.

According to Ayer, the simulator, which is updated on a weekly basis, is an SEIR compartmental model — the data sorts individuals into groups in various stages of the disease: susceptible, exposed, infected, and recovered. It combines established epidemiological and infectious disease modeling with state-of-the-art statistical modeling to reflect the most recent forecasts given a variety of scenarios. Intervention levels include “minimal restrictions,” like increased handwashing and avoiding sick individuals; “stay-at-home” orders, where people are advised to stay at home unless they need to pick up groceries or other essential goods; and lockdown, the most extreme level, as exercised in other parts of the world such as China and India.

The simulator has received a great deal of attention since its April 24 launch. In the first week, the website received more than 100,000 hits, and the simulator has been featured on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, NPR, the U.K.’s Daily Mail, Fox News, and numerous other media outlets.

The team is currently working to incorporate cell phone tracking data into the model to assess how increased mobility as businesses open will influence projections. In the future, they plan to expand the simulator globally.

Empty classrooms and supermarket shelves marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Keskinocak expects more signs of the times to come – such as pop-up pandemic clinics and the shortage and rationing of medical supplies beyond masks and ventilators.

Keskinocak is the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which studies how government and private sectors can cooperate to handle health and humanitarian crises. And she is William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

In previous research, Keskinocak’s team created a model that accurately ran the course of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and when COVID-19 struck, her team was already in the middle of modeling how special clinics could significantly slow a pandemic. In the meantime, temporary clinics in Wuhan, China, appear to have validated her model.

Healthcare expansion now

The surge of COVID-19 patients pushed Italy’s health care system into a very ugly crisis, and the U.S. needs to take measures now to handle similar patient surges. Pandemics often strike in two waves or more, and the second is usually the worst, so measures need to be lasting, Keskinocak said.

Even without COVID-19, the U.S. healthcare system has been under strain. Emergency rooms are often overcrowded; it takes a long time to schedule an appointment, and there is a chronic shortage of nursing staff.

[Read Keskinocak's guest op-ed in the New York Daily News: COVID clinics now]

“We need to expand capacity and unleash creative flexibility in our healthcare systems. We should use more telemedicine and create self-service stations for testing. I would particularly like to see specialized COVID-19 clinics established now,” Keskinocak said.

“Special clinics could be separate spaces in existing facilities or standalone facilities. As COVID-19 spreads, we expect a lot more people with cold- and flu-like symptoms to seek testing and care. The healthcare capacities are just not there for a business as usual approach, and taking it could harm patients by delaying care and increasing risk of infection.”

Gathering COVID-19 patients in tight spaces like waiting rooms with other patients would increase the coronavirus’ spread, and patients with preexisting conditions could face mortal threat. Contagion could also spread into hospitals.

“Dedicated pandemic clinics could implement targeted hygiene, air filtration, and specialized protective equipment beyond masks and gloves for healthcare workers. They can tailor workflows to test and care for patients quickly and effectively and keep them away from other patients and staff,” Keskinocak said.

Payment needs to be easy, too, including financing the uninsured. In the middle of a public health emergency, it is vital to not get bogged down by restrictions meant for normal times.

Potentially dangerous shortages

Toilet paper will make a comeback in supermarkets, but in its place, life-saving medications could become perilously scarce. Countries need to act now to prevent this from compounding the COVID-19 crisis.

“Dwindling availability of hospital beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment like masks and gloves during a patient surge – those are the obvious things. But we could also see shortages of items like asthma medication or antidepressants. Worst case, even food supplies could run low,” Keskinocak said.

[Read Keskinocak's guest op-ed in The Hill: medical supply chain dangers]

Here’s how shortages work and can lead to price gouging and also rationing. The latter can have good effects.

“Shortages are the result of supply-demand imbalance caused by either an unexpected increase in demand or unexpected decrease in supply or both. Shortages are common in crises such as natural disasters or health emergencies. But given the worldwide slowdown of economic activity in pandemics, disruptions could get much worse this time,” Keskinocak said.

“Supply chains are actually intricate webs of multiple parts that span the globe. Pandemics damage many of those parts, and it can take time to recover. This creates a more serious and worrisome imbalance between supply and demand.”

Toilet paper will return because people fear-hoard it in a panic but consume it at normal rates. When the panic runs its course, demand slows back down to the actual rate of consumption and its normal supply chain, which is relatively simple, catches up.

“With medicine and healthcare services and supplies, the increase in demand is typically already in line with consumption, so a shortage in supply or increase in demand can create a supply-demand gap that continues for a long time,” Keskinocak said. “Medical supply chains are also very complex and fragile.”

Future vaccine distribution

In normal times, most supply chains work at a plodding pace, and when crisis strikes, it is tough to ramp them up due to expensive equipment, complex logistics, and strict regulations, particularly in health care. Even temporary shortages of medicines and medical devices can have consequences for patients who need them.

“If shortages become serious, rationing – with a priority allocation to those most in need – can help balance demand and supply for critical items like medications.”

Once created and approved, the production of vaccines or antivirals for COVID-19 will ramp up slowly and could be in short supply at first. Decision-makers need plan investments now in the supply chains necessary for their effective distribution.

This will include painful, necessary decisions like prioritizing first doses for healthcare workers, people with pre-existing conditions, and the elderly. The current system of restocking vaccines in the U.S. after initial distribution also has serious gaps that need fixing to save many more lives.

In the meantime, social distancing is one of the best ways to protect everyone and reduce the patient surge into clinics. Do it if you or anyone in your household has any cold-like symptoms.

[Read Keskinocak's commentary on social distancing on AJC.com]

Also read: Vaccine Supply Gaps Can Make Pandemics Deadlier

Media contacts: Ben Brumfield (ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu) and John Toon (john.toon@comm.gatech.edu)

Hundreds of millions of vaccine doses will be shipped and distributed, and they will have to be kept very cold. In addition, people will need to be conscientious about getting both shots of the vaccine for strongest immunity, and vaccine skeptics will have to be convinced that the medicines are both safe and effective.

In a new article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons, Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, provides insight into the enormous challenges presented by this mammoth vaccine distribution. Even though distributing and administering vaccines is something the U.S. healthcare system does routinely, the size and timeline of this project are unprecedented, she noted.

Keskinocak is cautiously optimistic that the challenges will ultimately be addressed.

“There are certainly still lots of unknowns,” she said. “But the state plans I have seen look reasonable from a supply chain standpoint. Some of the decisions will be made once the states receive the vaccine, and exactly how they do it will be somewhat up to the local jurisdictions. There are still many things that need to be decided to make this unprecedented initiative live up to its goals.”

You can read the entire article on the Research Horizons website here.

The program is led by Terry Blum, Tedd Munchak Chair in Entrepreneurship and professor in the Scheller College of Business, and Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE William W. George Chair and professor. Participants will study the True North approach to leadership development created by Bill George that has been implemented at both Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Program activities include opportunities to examine self-awareness; values and principles; motivations; and how to lead an integrated life — all of which underlie becoming an authentic leader.

“Historically, healthcare providers have been focused on and were incentivized for treating disease, instead of a holistic systems approach that promotes overall health and well-being and is supported by new advances in analytics and data science,” said Keskinocak. “We hope that graduates of our master’s in health systems program will combine their knowledge of health systems with the skills they gain in this exciting leadership program to lead systemwide transformation from ‘sick care’ to ‘healthcare.’”

To make these predictions, the tool accounts for reported Covid-19 cases and deaths, face mask mandates, social distancing policies, changes in tests performed, rates of positive tests, and the Centers for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index (which assesses the health-related resilience of individual communities when confronted with external stresses, such as natural or human-caused disasters or disease outbreaks).

The tool offers an interactive map and a “data explorer” that allows users to select a specific county to see that county’s population, total new cases of Covid-19 in the past week, average daily cases in the past week, and the Covid-19 doubling rate (i.e., how many days it takes for the number of cases to double in a given county). 

“For effectively controlling the pandemic, it is critical to detect an outbreak in a timely manner so that the affected area can be isolated and the spread of Covid-19 infections to neighboring areas can be minimized; however, due to several reasons, it may take days or even weeks for humans to manually detect an outbreak. Our data-driven machine learning–based solution significantly speeds up and automates that process,” said Turgay Ayer, Ph.D., the director of Business Intelligence and Healthcare Analytics at the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems and the George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and associate professor in Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

“While earlier mitigation responses focused on state-level measures—such as a lockdown of an entire state—detecting local outbreaks will allow policy makers to implement measures at the county level—such as closing restaurants in a single county—to effectively contain the pandemic,” said Jagpreet Chhatwal, Ph.D., the associate director at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “The model is able to detect many of the prior outbreaks within a matter of days.”

Using the Covid-19 Outbreak Tool, the research team verified an outbreak in Johnson county in Iowa last week, which was linked to an outbreak at the University of Iowa. In addition, the tool identified several counties where outbreaks could be happening now. These include Harrisonburg County in Virginia, Wheeler County in Georgia, Monroe County in Indiana, and Whitman County in Washington, where infections are doubling in less than one week.

Alleviating suffering more effectively in the wake of hurricanes may require a shift in relief strategies, says a committee report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. 

In the immediate aftermath, relief agencies rush in survival supplies like water, food, medicine, and blankets. But instead of prioritizing and maintaining the relief supply chains, restoring a normal supply infrastructure could help more people more quickly. That’s the first recommendation from over 125 pages of case studies and analyses, issued by an eight-member National Academies committee that included Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. 

Following a hurricane, mangled homes and roads, contaminated water, and shortages of everything compound suffering. The report noted that restoring supply lines, primarily within the private sector, would accelerate recovery — but relief efforts can unintentionally conflict with that. 

“Relief supply chains inevitably compete with regular supply chains, given limited resources such as transportation. If the focus is primarily on pushing relief supply rather than restoring infrastructure and supply chains to normalcy, we may unwittingly delay recovery and prolong the aftermath,” said Keskinocak, who is also director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. 

In 2017, after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria (Maria killed over 3,000 people), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assigned the National Academies to make recommendations on improving relief response. “We spoke to stakeholders in affected areas — local governments, businesses, health systems, and more. We learned about the impact of storms on their community, what their participation was in the response process, and what went well and not so well,” Keskinocak said. 

Challenges to coordinating resource allocation, especially the logistics, have hindered recovery. This led to the report’s other major recommendations. 

“Areas where hurricanes may strike need to get a good understanding of how supply chains work under normal conditions along with their vulnerabilities, or weak links, so they can be proactive in strengthening supply,” Keskinocak explained. 

Disaster preparedness requires collaboration among government, relief agencies, and the private sector. All sectors would benefit from learning about supply chain dynamics and sharing public-private partnership best practices. 

“After a big storm strikes, it is typically not possible for any one entity to handle it all alone,” Keskinocak said. “Organizations such as FEMA could play the role of a convener to ensure various organizations collaborate, coordinate, and share information well ahead of time and in the aftermath.” 

The report recommends a focus on preparedness rather than post-disaster response. This could help alleviate situations in which FEMA marshals ample supplies but then finds that these supplies are not needed or cannot be effectively distributed to those in need. 

“I have the utmost respect for what FEMA does because they have to work under the most difficult circumstances, and these conditions may put them into binds that are out of their control,” Keskinocak said. “More preparedness on the ground could help get FEMA, local governments, private sector, and nongovernmental relief agencies to achieve synergies for saving lives and to alleviate suffering."

Although the 2020 Health and Humanitarian Supply Chain Management Program, set to take place in May, was postponed  due to COVID-19, now more than ever the communities and organizations we serve rely on our expertise and innovation to strengthen our supply chain systems and designs for better delivery of healthcare and pharmaceutical operations, as well as preparedness for, response to, and recovery from disasters and emergencies. That is why we have transitioned our 2020 Program to a online format.

Date and Structure:

The online HHSCM Program will take place July 13^th- July 30^th  through a Georgia tech video conferencing system.

Classes will be taught by LIVE video instruction similar to the experience you would receive in person with the same interactive components. Each course will run for 1 week Monday through Thursday from 9:30am to 1:00pm EST each day.

2020 Course Schedule:

•    Responsive Supply Chain Design and Operations July 13-16

•    Inventory Management and Resource Allocation in Supply Chains  July 20-23

•    Systems Operations and Strategic Interactions in Supply Chains -July 27-30

Registration Cost:

In addition to receiving this program at a more subtle pace from wherever you are, the 2020 Virtual Program, will also be offered at a reduced cost of $4,200 (originally $6,000). Courses taken individually (not the full  3 course program) will be $1800 each rather than the original fee of $2400. This is a major savings for continuing your professional education with Georgia Tech and we invite you to take advantage by joining us this June!

REGISTER NOW

Scholarships:

If you are interested in applying for scholarships you can do so now Here 

We are reviewing now and will accept on a rolling basis. We cannot guarantee availability but those who wish to apply should do so online as soon as possible to be considered.

(requires 2 letters of recommendation, current CV, and statement of purpose).

*Only those applying from NGOs or developing countries are eligible. Applicants should read instructions carefully.

Before Applying Online

•         *Prepare your current resume in English in PDF format

•         *Collect (2) current professional recommendation letters in English in PDF format (dated and signed within the last 3 months) and from a manager

•         Prepare a Qualification Statement summarizing your need for support and how you will benefit from participation

•         NOTE* There will be a small refundable fee of $330 usd (Per course )required to hold your place if given a full scholarship. The fee will be refunded to you upon completion of the course.

**The program is designed to engage a diverse group of participants through interactive learnings that encompass a broad range of supply chain topics related to health and humanitarian systems and beyond.

Learn More about our Program

Thank you to The UPS Foundation for making scholarships possible for the 2020 cohort!

Keskinocak has focused her career on heath and humanitarian systems, including hospital operations management, infectious disease modeling, and evaluating the effectiveness of intervention strategies. Since the initial coronavirus outbreak, she has worked on developing a comprehensive agent-based disease spread model, in collaboration with ISyE Professor Nicoleta Serban and Ph.D. students Buse Eylul Oruc, Arden Baxter, and others. The model estimates the spread of the disease geographically and over time; resource needs such as hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators; and enables the team to evaluate the impact of various intervention scenarios to determine the best course of action.

In a recent CNN interview, Keskinocak discusses the impact of social distancing and current shelter in place orders. She cautions that a careful, gradual approach is needed as society plans to go back to work and social life, a balancing act between public health and the economy. She emphasizes the importance of the need to continue social distancing to slow down COVID-19 spread, flatten the curve, and save lives.

Additional Stories Featuring Dr. Pinar Keskinocak

• 5/14 - Turn the Cacophony Of COVID-19 Responses Into a Symphony — Now!
• 5/11 - We’re in the Calm before a New Storm of COVID-19 Infections and Deaths
• 5/11 - Fox 5 - Georgia Tech model predicts alarming coronavirus numbers
• 4/27 - US pharmaceutical supply chain unprepared for COVID-19
• 4/21 - Fox 5 - Georgia Tech researchers create COVID-19 tool to help doctors spot 'false negative' patients
• 4/14 - CNN Newsroom - Pinar Keskinocak of Georgia Tech on How Fast Governments Should Get Back to Work
• 4/10 - We can’t shelter in place forever: How the coronavirus lockdown might end
• 4/1 - Underlying Health Disparities Could Mean Coronavirus Hits Some Communities Harder
• 3/31 - Hospitals, state scramble to prepare for coronavirus surge
• 3/28 - How Fast Can The U.S. Go Back To Work?
• 3/25 - When will 'social distancing' end?
• 3/25 - Create Dedicated Pandemic Clinics Now to Address COVID-19
• 3/23 - Coronavirus’ health-care capacity gut check: We need to radically ramp up facilities in America
• 3/20 - How to Triage Patients Who Need Intensive Care
• 3/18 - In 'coronapocalypse' the worst shortages could be deadly
• 3/16 - Georgia Tech professor explains how social distancing slows spread of COVID-19
• 3/6 - A Look At The ‘Supply Chain’ For Consumers And How Coronavirus Could Test It

Such challenges led Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta to establish a paper-based decision tree for ordering COVID-19 retests, and researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology turned it into an automated digital tool. Piedmont further developed the tool and has now built it into the hospital’s electronic medical record, where it influences the ordering of retests.

A user can answer their “ifs” by clicking through questions, and the “if-this-then-do-that” algorithm makes recommendations for best courses of action, ranging from immediately treating a patient for COVID-19 to retesting to consulting a specialist. The final decision remains with the physician.

The questions are deceptively simple, but the recommendations are not always obvious. That reflects the algorithm’s usefulness to fill gaps in thinking about the new sickness, which can confront clinicians with surprises.

“If a patient has not had close contact with positive patients and the first test came back negative, a physician may think the patient does not need to be retested. But actually, the patient may need a second test because they are in intensive care and also have suspicious chest X-rays,” said Georgia Tech graduate research assistant April Yu, who converted the decision tree into a digital tool.

“One of our big worries in using a brand-new test like the coronavirus test is that it will miss real cases, and this tool helps prevent that,” said Dr. Bronwen Garner, who helped develop the original decision tree and is an infectious disease specialist at Piedmont Healthcare. “It also helps reassure physicians when they get a negative result that it is probably a true negative.”

Suspenseful decision-making

A physician’s reaction to an initial negative test can mean life or death because the physician not only decides on follow-up testing but also on treatment pathways and quarantine.

“If you make a misstep in the thought process, it can lead to cascading impacts not only for the patient but also for healthcare professionals and family members, who may be exposed to the patient,” said Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “This tool is meant to help doctors easily stay on the decision tree path.”

Michael O’Toole, executive director of Piedmont Healthcare’s quality improvement department, originally pictured doctors getting an automated version of the decision tree to use on their phones. O’Toole called Keskinocak, and she tapped Yu, a member of her research group.

“Literally within four hours they had it ready for us. It was incredible,” said O’Toole, a Georgia Tech alumnus who studied industrial and systems engineering.

“It was a very pleasant surprise,” said Dr. Garner, who is also a Georgia Tech graduate. “Automated tools are better than a paper format because they’re in the same format as orders in our electronic system. We get notifications in real time instead of having to remember to check a piece of paper.”

The tool is in place in the system where doctors order retests and is specific to Piedmont’s workflow. It may not be directly transferable to other health care systems.

Piedmont Healthcare simplified the logic even more, and the hospital built its own custom alerts to guide physicians on retesting. For cases that are more ambiguous, Piedmont Healthcare’s final version of the tool also gives physicians inside the hospital guidance to consult with their in-house infectious disease specialists.

If-this-then-retest

In her original version, Yu had turned the decision tree criteria into a short panel of questions with yes and no answers. It took her six iterations to arrive at her final version.

Yu’s version asked whether the patient:

• has a relevant ailment
• previously tested positive for coronavirus
• is now in an intensive care unit
• has worsening lung conditions
• shows telltale lung damage in imaging
• has been diagnosed with a different ailment
• the patient has had contact with someone else who tested positive for coronavirus.

On the back end, the algorithm guided the user through risks of coronavirus presence based on the answers.

“The steps were easy to follow, and the answers were color-coded for urgency with white, yellow, and red,” said Keskinocak, who also directs Georgia Tech’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

One bright yellow answer read: “This patient needs re-testing 24 hours after the initial test!” And there were further recommendations on how to handle the case.

Here's how to subscribe to our free science and technology newsletter

Also read: Advice on DIY masks

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology

You can find recent Op-eds and guest columns below: 

Forbes- How Fast Can The U.S. Go Back To Work?

The Hill- In 'coronapocalypse' the worst shortages could be deadly

NY Daily News- Coronavirus’ health-care capacity gut check: We need to radically ramp up facilities in America

Read more through the below AJC articles links :

Hospitals, state scramble to prepare for coronavirus surge

Georgia Tech professor explains how social distancing slows spread of COVID-19

WHEN: Friday, November 14, 11AM
WHERE: Executive Classroom, Main ISyE Bldg (see bldg 57 on map, across Ferst Street from Campus Rec Center)
Stewart School of Systems & Industrial Engineering (ISyE)

*Parking is available in the W3 Visitor’s lot just next to the Main ISyE Building to the south of Groseclose on Ferst Drive.

SPEAKERS:

Abrar Ismail is the Director of Projects and the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority of Pakistan and an accomplished disaster manager. He started his career in the Pakistan Army as a lieutenant in the Infantry, occupying his role in the Pakistan Army as a first responder during disasters, both man-made and natural. He served as coordinator for Afghan refugees at Camp Shamshatu, which housed a half-million displaced Afghan refugees in 1988 after the Soviet-Afghan War. He worked as a rescue and relief officer during the 1992 floods in Pakistan that inundated 60% of agricultural land in Punjab province (the backbone of Pakistan's economy). In 2001, Abrar also took part as a first responder to provide relief and rescue to an earthquake in the Gilgit Baltistan region in Northern Pakistan. Greatly effected by the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, Abrar retired early from the Army and joined the disaster management effort permanently. Since that time, he has performed as chief logistics officer during "Operation Life Line," the largest Peacetime airlift and relief and rescue operations of the decade, covering an area the size of Switzerland. After the emergency phase of operations, he took charge of a large transitional shelter project. During the reconstruction phase he oversaw the completion of large projects which built 500,000 houses, 50 schools, 15 health facilities and rehabilitated the completely destroyed town of Balakot, housing over 5000 families.

Abrar holds an MPhil in Development Studies from Pakistan and is a graduate from Asia Pacific Center for Security studies in Hawaii. He also holds certificates in disaster and emergency management from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, GA Tech, Kobe University Japan and METU, Turkey. Due to his meritorious services and devotion to serving Humanity, Abrar was presented with one of Pakistan's highest honors, The Medal of Honor (Tamgha-I-Imtiaz) in 2013.

Todd Shea is the founder of Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS). His disaster response experience began in the hours and days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when he provided supplies and medicines to firefighters, National Guard troops and other first responders at "Ground Zero" in New York City. He then went on to volunteer in Sri Lanka after the disastrous tsunami in 2004 and in then worked as a logistics coordinator and animal rescuer in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. On the day he returned from his deployment in New Orleans, a devastating earthquake happened in Pakistan and he immediately joined a group of Pakistani American doctors who were deploying to the disaster zone in Northern Pakistan. Since then he has been working in Pakistan to assist people who have been affected by natural disasters and conflict. In 2010 he initiated a mission to deploy doctors in Haiti to help those affected by the devastating earthquake, in early 2011 he provided disaster relief services to tsunami victims in Japan, assisted in the coordination of relief during Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012 and deployed to The Philippines to provide logistical support to several Humanitarian organizations responding to Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

Todd and his team at CDRS are currently deploying two emergency response missions to mobile medical teams to support the basic healthcare needs of families who have been forced to flee their homes due to floods in Punjab and due to the war between the Pakistan Army and The Taliban in North Waziristan. Todd has received many honors and commendations for his relief work, including The Medal of Sacrifice from Pakistan and The Humanitarian Effort of the Year award for 2014 by the Pakistan Achievement Awards for The UK and Europe.

Healthcare Delivery and Operations 

The Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) recently hosted a 1-day event focused on improving health systems with leaders from across the fields of healthcare delivery and operations. The event included panel sessions on “Industry Trends in Healthcare Delivery," “Educating the Next Generation in Health Systems” and "Alumni Response: What Should GT Do?", as well as presentations and posters on new research.

Friday, September 16th, 9:00am – 5:00pm
Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), 85 Fifth Street

DOWNLOADS

• Available Presentations [zip 7.27MB]
• Event Handout [pdf 318KB]
• Panel session Video Recordings (see below links for each panel)

AGENDA

9:00 – 9:10   Welcome and introduction to IRCs and Coda Project (Video)

9:30 – 10:45   Panel 1: “Industry Trends in Healthcare Delivery” (Video)

• Courtney Baechler, MD, Vice President, Penny George Institute for Health and Healing
• Allana Cummings, Chief Information Officer (CIO), Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
• Becca Norris, VP, Strategic Business Initiatives, McKesson Health Systems, McKesson Corporation
• Rhonda Scott, PhD, RN, NE-BC, NEA-BC, Executive Vice President / Chief Operating Officer/ Chief Nursing Officer, Grady Health System
• *Moderator: Margaret Wagner Dahl, Associate Vice President for Health IT, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech

10:45 – 11:15   Break & Poster Session

11:15 – 12:15   CHHS Research Rapid-Fire Presentations (Video)

• Turgay Ayer, PhD, George Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Predictive Health, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Jon Duke, MD, Director of Health Data Informatics, College of Computing, School of Computational Science & Engineering; Principal Research Scientist, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Information & Cyber Sciences Directorate, Georgia Tech
• Nicoleta Serban, PhD, Coca-Cola Associate Professor, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Co-founder and Co-director, Center for Health Analytics
• Craig Zimring, PhD, Director, SimTigrate Design Lab; Professor, School of Architecture, Georgia Tech
• *Moderator: Edwin Romeijn, PhD, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech
   

12:15 – 1:30   Lunch (across street at GA Tech Hotel Dining Room, 800 Spring Street)
 

1:30 – 2:45   Panel 2: “Educating the Next Generation in Health Systems” (Video)

• James (Jim) Curran, MD, MPH, Dean, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University
• Thomas Grace, MPH, Associate Medical Center Director, Atlanta Veteran Affairs Medical Center
• Amanda Mewborn, Executive Director, Project Management, Piedmont Hospital
• Chesley Richards, MD, MPH, FACP, Deputy Director for Public Health Scientific Services; Director, Office of Public Health Scientific Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• *Moderator: Bill Todd, Professor of the Practice, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Tech
   

2:45 – 3:45   Break & Poster Session
 

3:45 – 4:30   Panel 3: Alumni Answer “What Should GT Do?” (Video)

• Kristin Goin, MSHS, Senior Improvement Consultant, Shepherd Center
• Leanne Metcalf, PhD, Senior Director of Consultative Data Science, Blue Cross and Blue Shield (IL, TX, OK, NM, MT)
• Michael Polak, Vice President for Product Management, Ingenious Med
• *Moderator: Julie Swann, PhD, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech

4:30 – 5:30   Reception (with posters) *light refreshments at event venue

Event Organizers

Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; ADVANCE Professor, College of Engineering; Co-director, Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), Georgia Tech​

Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor, Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Co-director, Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS); Co-founder and Co-director, Center for Health Analytics, Georgia Tech

Paul Griffin, Research Director in Healthcare Delivery, Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Tech

The Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) offers a professional certificate program designed for practitioners in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, industry, and military who are active participants in humanitarian operations including disaster response, long term development and public health operations.

The courses are developed for practitioners seeking to build skills to improve decision making in preparedness, response operations planning, and system design. Courses include many interactive components, such as case studies and games, which help professionals in the health and humanitarian sectors to link the challenges and decision-making tradeoffs they face in practice with the systematic approaches, tools, and techniques presented.

The 2016 class was comprised of a diverse group of over 30 practitioners with extensive experience in the global health and humanitarian sectors, based in 20 different countries, who have worked in a combined 80+ countries throughout their careers, adding to the valuable networking and experience sharing that is a highlight of the in-person program

The below courses make up the 3-module Health and Humanitarian Supply Chain Management Certificate:

• Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations- MAY 15-16
• Tactical Decision Making in Public Health & Humanitarian Response- MAY 17-18
• Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response- MAY 19-20

TO REGISTER: click on the link to the Pre-Planning Strategy course, and register for each of the three courses (adding each to your virtual cart), and then the certificate tuition fee will be generated at the end.

SCHOLARSHIP support for practitioners from NGOs and developing countries is made available through the generosity of The UPS Foundation, Andrea Laliberte, and Richard E. and Charlene O. Zalesky. For eligibility requirements and to apply online for a scholarship to attend the training, please visit http://hhls.scl.gatech.edu.
 

PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK:

The Systems Dynamics framework was incredibly well presented, and has given me not only a new career interest, but also a tool with which to analyze and understand complex problems, including both the problems faced by humanitarian organizations and the problems they create. 
Wendi McAfee, Program Coordinator for the Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center at the Task Force for Global Health

The course really enlightened me in many aspects of the humanitarian supply chain process. The forecasting and decision making tools will provide me with a lot of opportunities to optimize both processes and supply chains.
Sanne Wijnhorst, Procurement Specialist for Oxfam Novib (Netherlands)

The relevance of the decision support tools helped me to make use of inventory analysis, using a more mathematical approach while planning and building strategies.
Rachel Gordon-Roberts, Logistics Coordinator, Emergency and Humanitarian Assistance from CARE USA

The diverse cohort provides examples and perspectives to support and complete the topics covered in lectures; conversations outside lectures during breaks and lunch were a great way for us to learn from each other and absorb. Working in groups on class projects/games was a great way to learn as well.
Daniel Ngongo, Assistant Logistics Officer with the Management Science for Health (MSH/USAID) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

*Click here for VIDEO of the event

On April 19th, the Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) brought together faculty across campus to present new research and technology relating to resilience, social impact, public health, international development, and other topics.

Professors Catherine Ross, Margaret Wagner Dahl, and Ellen Zegura shared research, information on new project-based courses, and internships taking place at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, Computing for Good (C4G) at the College of Computing, the Serve Learn Sustain Initiative (SLS), Data Science for Social Good, and the Enterprise Innovation Institute (Ei2), as well as related partnerships with local and federal government and organizations around the world.

Dr. Catherine Ross (http://catherine.ross.gatech.edu/)
Catherine L. Ross is the Harry West Professor and Director of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development and Deputy Director of the National Transportation Center for  Productivity and Management. She is an internationally respected researcher and speaker on issues of land use, transportation planning, health impact assessment (HIA), and quality growth. She is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Her last two books are Megaregions Planning for Global Competitiveness, Island Press 2009, and Health Impact Assessment in the United States, Springer 2014. In 2009, Dr. Ross was selected to advise the Obama Administration on the first‐ever White House Office of Urban Affairs. She earned a BA degree from Kent State University followed by a Master's Degree and Doctorate from Cornell University in Regional Planning. She completed post-doctorate work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Margaret Wagner Dahl (http://www.ti.gatech.edu/about/people/margaret-dahl)
Margaret Wagner Dahl is the Associate Vice President (AVP) for Health IT Extension Services. She works specifically with health care providers and the health IT industry by making Georgia Tech’s interoperability and integration resources accessible, as well as startup company technology validation and workforce training programs. Most recently, Dahl was AVP for Economic Development at the University of Georgia (UGA) and Director of the Georgia BioBusiness Center, a biotechnology business incubator tied closely to interdisciplinary research at UGA. Before UGA, she was Director of Operations at the Austin Technology Incubator, The University of Texas at Austin (U.T.). Prior to U.T. Austin, she was Director of Licensing at the University of Washington’s Office of Technology Transfer and previously co-founded two successful startup companies. Dahl has a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Geography from the National University of Ireland-Maynooth in County Kildare, Ireland. She currently serves as Trustee for the American Hospital Association’s Council on Governance, Trustee for the Georgia Hospital Association and Vice Chair for Athens Regional Health System.

Dr. Ellen Zegura (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Ellen.Zegura)
Professor Zegura currently chairs the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing. Dr. Zegura began the Compute for Good (C4G) initiative to leverage computing to study and address pressing societal problems. The C4G vision is that computing and related disciplines can play a critical role in addressing systemic societal problems, and that tackling such problems can push the intellectual boundaries of the disciplines. One realization of C4G is a project-based senior/graduate class. Dr. Zegura’s research interests include the development of wide-area (Internet) networking services and mobile wireless networking, such as those utilized by applications distributed across multiple administrative domains (e.g., web, file sharing, multi-media distribution). She is currently working on projects in these areas funded by DARPA and NSF as well as the “Internet for Everyone Really (IFER)” project to design “a future Internet architecture for all 6 Billion of the world’s people, starting from considerations of the 3 Billion not currently reached by the Internet.” Dr. Zegura has been a faculty of Georgia Tech since 1993. She received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and in Electrical Engineering (1987), an M.S. degree in Computer Science (1990), and a D.Sc. in Computer Science (1993) all from Washington University, St. Louis.

Wed, April 19th, 2017, 3pm – 6pm, East Architecture Building, Auditorium (Classroom 123) (Building 76 on map) *Detailed instructions below. Please RSVP online here (Event is free, light refreshments will be provided).

Health experts determine the ideal vaccine formula each season, which is then produced in small batches, leading to uneven supply and demand while vaccine production ramps up. Historically, due to fairness considerations, vaccines have been allocated pro rata, which means proportionally based on the population of a region. While this may seem like the best way to fairly distribute a limited supply, it does not take demand and “uptake” — the number of people who are willing to be vaccinated — into account.

“The uptake rate can vary by region, for various reasons.” explained Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor, and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS). “If the limited vaccine inventory is allocated proportionally to the population in different regions without considering the uptake rate, unused vaccine inventory may pile up in some areas while other areas experience shortages.”

With the goal of better matching supply and demand, Zihao Li (Ph.D. 16), Keskinocak, and CHHS co-founder and Professor Julie Swann (BIE 1996) from NC State University proposed a new allocation strategy, where the limited vaccine inventory is allocated pro rata only to those regions that continue to experience a positive uptake rate. They developed a simulation model to compare the current and proposed vaccine allocation strategies.

“We found that the proposed strategy would benefit the entire population because it leads to a higher number of people vaccinated and less inventory leftover,” explained Keskinocak.

However, vaccine inventory visibility in public health supply chains is limited, and accurate uptake rates may not always be available in each geographic area. Keskinocak hopes the results of the study will encourage local reporting of both the number of vaccines administered during a season and the amount that is unused, to inform future allocation decisions.

Optimizing the flu vaccine supply chain will also help when the next pandemic strikes. Historically, pandemics occur every 30-40 years, but the results can be devastating. According to the CDC, the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic resulted in 60.8 million illnesses and 12,469 deaths in the U.S. alone.

“Information about uptake rates is even more important during a pandemic,” added Keskinocak, “not only for the effective allocation of vaccines to slow the spread of the disease, but also to increase public awareness efforts about vaccinations in areas where uptake is low.”

This study was supported by a seed grant from Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. This research was also supported in part by the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Junior Faculty Endowment Fund and the following Georgia Tech benefactors: William W. George, Andrea Laliberte, Joseph C. Mello, and Richard “Rick” E. and Charlene Zalesky.

In some ways, this office represents the pinnacle of Keskinocak’s longstanding service to INFORMS, which began when she was a junior faculty member. Since then, she has served on the INFORMS board as both vice president of membership and professional recognition and secretary; co-founder and president of the Junior Faculty Interest Group Forum and Pubic Sector Operations Research Section; and president of the Women in OR/MS Forum and the Health Applications Society. She also has served as an officer of other INFORMS sections, on the editorial boards of several journals, and as chair of both the Doctoral Colloquium and Nicholson Paper Competition.

Keskinocak has been serving as president-elect of INFORMS since January 2019. After her presidency in 2020, she will remain on the executive board for one year as past president. In this interview, she discusses her goals for INFORMS’ growth, outreach, and impact.

As an ISyE faculty member, you’re very busy – teaching, researching, directing CHHS. Given this, why are you also committed to active involvement in INFORMS?

INFORMS is the largest professional society for our field. As an organization that has both academic and non-academic members, it is a community influencing the current and future impact of our field in education, research, and practice. I care about the impact our work can have on society and businesses, and for that reason, it is important for me to contribute as much as I can.

What are some of your goals for your presidency?

There are several exciting areas I would like to focus on.

Our membership has been strong and growing for a number of years. I believe we can further extend our reach in terms of attracting and retaining student members, as well as practice members. One way to do this to reach out to younger generations and share information about our field. Middle school and high school students may have no awareness of the exciting career opportunities available to them through operations research and analytics. INFORMS has a history of successful K-12 outreach, and I hope we will continue to build on that, as well as continuing our outreach to undergraduate and graduate student members.

Historically, we have seen engagement and collaborations between our academic and practice members. There’s an opportunity to increase such interactions by building more and stronger bridges between academia and practice. There are many practitioners whose work involves operations research or analytics. But they may not be engaged with INFORMS – or even if they are, their engagement might be primarily with practice members. So, we still have opportunities to increase engagement and collaborations between academia and practice (including industry and government), considering what academia might offer to positively impact practice, and the challenging problems faced by practitioners to spur new research and innovation.  

While INFORMS’ engagement with industry has been strong, we can build on our policy impact by increasing our engagement with governmental and non-governmental agencies (NGOs). This continues to be another growth area for the organization – domestically and internationally. We have the opportunity to tackle some of the most complex problems facing humanity, and we need to be connecting more to the decision-makers, so that when they have issues that require data-driven analytical approaches, they think of and reach out to INFORMS and its members.

We also have opportunities to further diversify our membership base and enhance our culture of inclusivity. The STEM fields generally face challenges in diversity and inclusion, and INFORMS is no exception, though as an organization, we have made significant strides. For example, we established a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, ethics guidelines, and a code of conduct.

The INFORMS board just approved a new initiative proposal to establish an INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Ambassadors Program. These ambassadors, both individually and collectively, will work on initiatives to improve DEI within the broader INFORMS community. We are very excited about the possibilities for this program, which is open to all INFORMS members and staff.

What is most exciting to you about this opportunity to serve as president?

INFORMS is an amazing organization and has been on a positive trajectory for several years. Just look at our performance metrics in terms of our membership, participation in our conferences, our journals, the quality and number of journal articles published, and how these articles are consumed by readers. So this is a fantastic time for INFORMS – we can communally be proud of it. Our current position of strength gives us opportunities to take some bigger leaps.

 You’re obviously a systems thinker. How will that contribute to your role as INFORMS president?

We definitely need to be implementing the OR and analytical techniques we use in our day to day research and work into INFORMS operations. For some of these future goals and also current initiatives, the pieces all need to fit together. Our portfolio includes conferences, journals, sections and societies, etc. When we take action in one area, it has impact and implications for the others as well. That’s where the systems thinking becomes important: Considering our actions and strategies not in isolation for each part of our portfolio, but synergistically, to make progress in line with our overarching goals. Of course progress can only happen with the synergistic collaborations between our amazing staff, members, and our external constituents. As a famous African proverb states, “Go alone if you want to go fast; go together if you want to go far.”

After your presidency, what will your future involvement in INFORMS look like?

I have always been committed to INFORMS, and I envision my involvement will continue beyond 2020-21, via journal editorial boards, outreach, etc. I am also excited about the new DEI Ambassadors program and hope to contribute to its progress and success moving forward. INFORMS is an incredible organization. I am grateful to be a member, and I encourage and invite everyone to engage.

Forum Co-chair Professor Dima Nazzal and speakers highlighted that despite increasing spending in healthcare in the US, there has not been a corresponding improvement in health outcomes. The "waste" is in part due to how healthcare operations are run but also how medicine is practiced, e.g., over-testing, over-medication, or gaps in the continuity of care. These problems are exacerbated with the aging population, patients with multiple chronic conditions, and end of life care. During rapid fire presentation session, Professor Nisha Botchway shared that social conditions must change while other presenters such as Leanne West, Professor Yajun Mei and Professor Yao Xie suggested that a combination of data science, analytics, predictive modeling, decision-support tools, and technology focused on better resource allocation may be the key.

In her closing remarks, CHHS Director Professor Pinar Keskinocak posed the question "How do we move from sick care to healthcare?" She highlighted the importance of taking a systems approach, and the tremendous potential of collaborations between engineers, medical and public health professionals, city planners, economists, etc. for addressing some of these complex issues at the root, not with a band-aid approach..

Please visit http://pwp.gatech.edu/hsng2019/agenda/ to see video recordings of sessions, pdf presentations and photos from the forum.

To share your research and ideas advancing health systems or to collaborate further with CHHS, connect with us on social media @CHHSGatech or email us CHHS@gatech.edu.

In this 8th edition, the Atlanta Global Health Summit explored the theme of urban environments and health. Panels and fireside chats touched upon global heath concerns that affect cities and ways to manage these issues: HIV/AIDS, non-communicable and infectious diseases and digital health.

CHHS is proud to have been a sponsor of this important event and considers it to be an informative and transformative experience for all.

But how can we prepare for or respond to events that often can’t be predicted, nor their true impact estimated, in order to save lives, save money, and solve the myriad problems that come as a result?

The answer: operations research and analytics. "Resoundingly Human," the INFORMS podcast, presents Pinar Keskinocak, the 2019 INFORMS President-elect, ISyE William W. George Chair, and co-founder and director of Georgia Tech's Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

You can listen to the podcast episode here: http://bit.ly/2Pkg7cU.

Representatives from the humanitarian sector, government, NGOs, foundations and private industry, and academia present diverse perspectives in health and humanitarian challenges through keynote addresses, panel discussions, focused workshops, lunchtime group discussions, and interactive poster sessions covering a broad set of research topics and applications.

The conference is sure to bring together an abundance of professionals active in the global health and humanitarian sectors from around the world. The event is chaired annually by the Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), NCSU, INSEAD Humanitarian Research Group, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, Northeastern University. This year’s conference is pleased to have as Co- organizers The International Association of Public Health Logisticians (IAPHL) and People that Deliver, and University of Rwanda Regional Center for Excellence as our Host.

We invite you to attend and particpate as a presenter in the following areas: collaborative workshops, oral presentations and poster sessions. To see our requirements and submit a proposal visit our Call For Presentations Page

To deal with the problem of HCW shortages, the TFGH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Mozambique Ministry of Health (MOH) joined forces.Their efforts were supported by a team from Georgia Tech, which included graduate and undergraduate students, former ISyE faculty member Julie Swann, and was led by Professor Pinar Keskinocak, a faculty member in ISyE and the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

They jointly developed a solution, called the Workforce Allocation Optimization (WAO) Tool. At the core of WAO is an integer programming model, which is solved to find the best allocation of HCWs to match demand and supply, considering various constraints, objectives, and preferences.

Currently, ISyE alumna Sheereen Brown (BSIE 13, MSHS 14) serves as a business analyst for the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), a program of TFGH. She works with a team that led implementation of the tool in Mozambique. What makes the tool particularly special is that for the first time, HCW placement preferences are taken into account.

“Previously, in Mozambique, there was a very top-down approach to allocation, without any data to drive that process,” said Brown. “There was no preference data from the HCWs — nobody got a say in where they went.”

The problem with this approach is that once HCWs were placed somewhere, they would immediately apply for a transfer so they could go to a district of their choice.

The Excel-based WAO tool — specifically designed this way so developing countries don’t have to spend a lot of money on expensive specialized software — tackles the HCW allocation problem from two sides: where the need is greatest and where workers want to be placed.

In December 2015, Mozambique’s MOH put the allocation tool in place to great success. By asking HCWs their top three preferences for placement within the country, over 75 percent of HCWs were satisfactorily placed in one of their top three preferences. In the spring of 2018, a team from TFGH traveled to Zambia and Tanzania to train MOH officials on how to use the tool, which they received in a cloud-based portal.

“In Zambia, the allocation process typically takes 14 days annually,” Brown said. “The WAO tool will cut that down significantly, with the ability to allocate workers in minutes.” The tool has not yet been fully implemented in Zambia, so she described the tool’s impact as currently “a potential success.”

“The MOHs in all three countries are working with PHII/TFGH and African-based software development firms to integrate the tool within the MOHs’ existing information systems,” Brown added.

Please visit http://pwp.gatech.edu/hsng2018/ to see video recordings of sessions, pdf presentations and photos from the forum.

To share your research and ideas advancing health systems or to collaborate further with CHHS, connect with us on social media @CHHSGatech or email us CHHS@gatech.edu.

“Congratulations to Pinar on this exciting leadership opportunity,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “By serving in this very important role in the largest professional association for operations research, management science, and analytics professionals, she will continue to position both herself and ISyE as leaders in our field and assist in the advancement of our profession.”

Keskinocak, the ADVANCE Professor in Tech’s College of Engineering and the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, is also an INFORMS Fellow. Keskinocak said, “As an active INFORMS member since 1996, I have enthusiastically served our community in a variety of roles. I am grateful for this opportunity to continue my service in collaboration with INFORMS members and constituents to expand the reach and impact of our community.

“One of my priority areas is to further amplify the impact and reach of our community, for example, by focusing on broadening our membership base, establishing links with various application areas, building/strengthening the bridges between academia and industry, and broadly disseminating the work of our members highlighting their contributions.”

“The future of our field will be shaped by the new generation,” she added. “Thus, it is important to promote diversity and inclusion in our community.”

Keskinocak has held many previous roles within INFORMS. She served as both secretary and the vice president of membership and professional recognition on the INFORMS Board. She co-founded and served as president of the Public Sector Operations Research Section and the Junior Faculty Interaction Group Forum, as well as the president of the Health Applications Society and the Women in OR/MS Forum.

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly in health and humanitarian systems, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation.

While visiting Virginia in December 2015, the Summerville, SC teenager decided to try snowboarding. Her mom, Christine, videotaped the inaugural run. To her horror, she watched as Emily missed a turn and crashed, hitting her head on an exposed metal pole.

Thankfully, Emily survived. But recovery – which began with learning how to walk and talk again – was long and arduous. It required months of rehabilitation at Shepherd Pathways in Atlanta.

Shepherd Pathways specializes in helping people overcome traumatic brain injuries, severe spinal cord injuries, and other serious medical conditions. It is complex work. For each patient, Pathways must provide the right mix of physical, speech, occupational, and other kinds of therapies.

Here’s something else that is incredibly complex: scheduling these therapies.

At any given time, Shepherd Pathways has dozens of patients with varying injuries, requiring an assortment of skilled staff, in sessions spread out over different periods of time. Their way of orchestrating it all is to hold weekly assemblies of up to 25 therapists, gathering them in a room with clip-boarded sheets and pencils — a scene that, when described, evokes the old trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

“Every week, they come into this big room and create a whole schedule on paper,” said Meena Iyer, senior process improvement advisor for Shepherd. “It is a major time commitment.”

They knew there had to be a better way. And to find it, Shepherd turned to Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

Once a year, Keskinocak teaches a graduate-level course in which student teams apply their industrial engineering, operations research, and data analytics skills to solve real-world problems in health care, humanitarian systems, and other public sector or societal applications. During spring 2017, one of the project teams focused on streamlining and automating the scheduling process at Pathways.

“Pinar was actually one of my professors,” said Kristin Goin (MSHS 08), Shepherd’s former senior improvement consultant who teamed up with Pathways colleague Iyer on the project. “I knew that optimization and scheduling was a key skill set that industrial engineers had.”

“One of the first steps was to answer the question, ‘What is ideal care?’” Keskinocak recalled. “The Pathways schedule was somewhat provider-centric. As we started working, we asked them how they would provide an ideal care to patients if they had a magic wand. This question was helpful in thinking about each patient’s unique needs.”

Defining the problem also meant examining the current state of scheduling in detail. “We created a map of every aspect of the manual scheduling process,” Goin said. “We put that across an entire wall of a room, like a war room, and went over every step.” They also surveyed Pathways staff to identify pain points and inefficiencies.

Under the guidance of Goin, Iyer, Keskinocak, and the Pathways staff, the six-member student team first streamlined how Pathways collected information on both the needs of the patients and the availability of the staff. They created two tools to do this, each to ensure that complete and consistent sets of data were available.

“After that, we developed heuristic algorithms,” explained Kirthana Hampapur, who was a master’s student in ISyE at the time, and a member of the student team. “The heuristic would go through the two tools – the patient info, which we called an Ideal Plan of Care tool, and the staff availability data – then assign each patient to therapists across multiple time slots.”

The students could have declared victory, as patient scheduling was now much closer to automation. But Hampapur remembered, “We felt like we hadn’t left the project in a good place.” The process was still not optimized to provide patients with as many therapy appointments as possible.

So after consulting with Keskinocak, she started a summer internship with Shepherd Pathways to continue the work. Using Python, the high-level programming language employed in application development, Hampapur continued to develop and implement the heuristic. Then in the fall semester, as she began pursuing her Ph.D., she teamed up with another student, Idil Arsik, also a Ph.D. student in ISyE, to develop a model of mixed integer-programming to improve the solution.

The result was something Shepherd nicknamed “The Wizard.”

“This was the actual software that took into account all of the input on patient needs, all of the staff availability, and then several other rules, such as when a certain patient has to go with a certain staff member,” Goin said. “The Wizard then generated the schedule.”

“Given the specified objectives and constraints, it creates the best schedule possible,” Hampapur said, “because every patient gets what he or she needs, and the number of therapy appointments is maximized.”

The outcome was happy for Shepherd Pathways. The time required for scheduling was reduced by 60 percent, and more than 90 percent of scheduling requirements were met.

“With 150 patients who have different needs, there are millions of possible schedule combinations,” Goin said. “The number of constraints is phenomenal, so it’s like peeling an onion. Georgia Tech has never failed to deliver the onion as peeled.”

To help address these issues, the 10^th Annual Health & Humanitarian Logistics Conference (HHLC) brought together leaders and practitioners from around the world to address topics such as health emergencies, health systems strengthening, and disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. HHLC is one of the few conferences that brings representatives from both health and humanitarian arenas together to highlight such challenges and share best practices. It also serves as a forum for collaboration and coordination across multiple sectors and organizations.

“The motivation for convening this conference has been two-fold: to address natural and man-made disasters that affect thousands of people every year, as well as ongoing development needs in health and well-being, nutrition, education, and other key areas,” said Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), the College of Engineering’s ADVANCE Professor, and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS).

This year’s conference was held on July 18 and 19 in Dubai, UAE. The conference featured numerous workshops and panel discussions, with approximately 200 speakers and attendees from 44 countries and 122 organizations, including world leaders in the health and humanitarian sectors, current and former ministers of health, representatives from governmental and non-governmental organizations, industry, foundations, and academia.

The conference began with a keynote presentation from Jagan Chapagain, the Under-Secretary-General for Programmes and Operation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Chapagain discussed the many challenges faced during public health emergencies and the strategies to strengthen the system to better meet the needs of the public during normal times and beyond.

“Strong health systems help prevent humanitarian crises,” explained Chapagain. “They provide a basis for early interventions so that quick action can be taken to stop the spread of epidemics and also help reduce the impact of non-communicable diseases. At the same time humanitarian issues could provide the necessary resources and impetus to strengthen the health systems in the countries affected by crises. Each approach reinforces the other.”

“We hope that the presentations and discussions the conference hosted over the years help us articulate the pressing challenges related to health and humanitarian systems and inspire new ideas and practices toward positive change,” added Keskinocak. “Given the complexity of these problems, collaboration among different entities is essential in generating sustainable solutions. We hope that the conference will continue to foster new partnerships and synergies across the many different organizations represented by the attendees.”

While CHHS carried the torch in kick-starting and organizing the conference in Atlanta during its first three years, other organizations, including INSEAD, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, Northeastern University, and NC State, joined as co-organizers over the past seven years, also in collaboration with People that Deliver and the International Association of Public Health Logisticians in 2018.

Previous conference locations include the United States, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, and Denmark.

Conference organizers are grateful for the generous sponsorship from key partners. UPS Foundation has been the premiere sponsor for nine consecutive years, and other sponsors include Chemonics, The Coca-Cola Company, Imperial Health Sciences, Imres, ISyE, Johnson & Johnson, Kühne Stiftung, Partnership for Supply Chain Management, Ryder, Pfizer, Walmart, and William Davidson Institute.

In addition to the conference, CHHS offers an annual professional certificate in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management. The intensive six-day course brings together international participants in global health care roles to learn how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations.

To learn more about CHHS and its activities, visit www.chhs.gatech.edu.

Amanda drove the family car; Brent, who had a different schedule, rode the school bus. “He had to wake up at 5 a.m. to catch the bus at 6, and he arrived at school at 7:30,” recalled Chu, an ISyE student pursuing a Ph.D. in operations research. “Whereas, I could roll out of bed any time.”

The disparity stayed with her. Years later, when it came time to choose a project in industrial systems engineering, Chu had no problem deciding: school bus schedules.

Her advisor, Professor Pinar Keskinocak, director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, connected Chu with a former student, Monica Villarreal (Ph.D. 2014), a senior planning analyst with Denver Public Schools. The school system wanted to make its bus scheduling more adaptable to changing conditions and avoid having to manually adjust route assignments.

Thus, Chu quickly became a student of the enormously complicated world of school bus schedules. She delved into academic journal articles. She investigated software apps. And she explored a landscape of variables – route distances, passenger capacity, wheelchair vs. non-wheelchair riders, and school “bell times,” to name a few.

Months of work led to a Microsoft Excel-based decision-support tool that gives the school system a new picture of the entire bus fleet scheduling.

“It’s designed to present alternatives,” Chu explained. “It actually generates new bus route assignments, based on entered data, reflecting objectives and constraints. It also helps the school system quickly analyze bus route assignments.”

“We’re using the technology to make routes for our drivers for the 2018-19 academic year,” said Villarreal, senior planning analyst for Denver Public Schools. “Since there’s a shortage of bus drivers here, we have to be as efficient as possible in order to minimize the outsourcing of routes. This new tool will save us time as well as money, which we can then put back into the classroom.” 

Chu is now adapting the technology for Atlanta’s public school system and contemplating a way to bring the program to larger markets.

Patients at Emory Winship have been experiencing long wait times resulting in low patient satisfaction scores. The team focused on improving process flow, communication, and visibility throughout the center. Deliverables consist of a simulation with a user interface, a real-time visibility tool, and a list of recommendations and policy changes, several of which were implemented. Patient wait times were reduced significantly, increasing patient satisfaction and allowing more patients to be treated, bringing in an additional $1.2 million annual profit.

Finalists in the competition were three senior design teams who worked with the CDC, Interface, and UPS.

The CDC Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition for their project titled Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Identification and Allocation of Increased-Risk Encephalitis Organs. Students Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker were guided by their faculty advisor William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak. Since 2002, 13 clusters of infectious encephalitis have been transmitted through solid-state organ transplantation. Currently, there is no standardized screening procedure to differentiate between infectious and non-infectious encephalitis. In this project, they developed two decision-support tools: 

1. An infectious encephalitis risk calculator for physicians to estimate the probability that a donor has infectious encephalitis.

2. A liver transplant decision aid for transplant doctors and patients to evaluate the trade-offs between accepting/rejecting an increased-risk encephalitis liver.

The Interface Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition. Students include Andrew Bedenk, Kaitlyn Castaneira, Margaret Massey, Jonathan Porter, James Tanzy, and Andrew Taylor. Their faculty advisor is Associate Professor Marc Goetschalckx. Their project focused on redesigning Interface's warehousing systems and strategies in order to reduce the excessive pick and stage cycle times, lost inventory, and high inventory levels. They developed a four-step solution to address all of these issues, including investments in more advanced Warehouse Management System software, reevaluation and reduction of inventory levels, racking and forklift upgrades, and internal process improvements. Their solution will save Interface an estimated $1.6 million annually, with an estimated 30% ten-year internal rate of return.

The UPS Senior Design team placed as a finalist in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition for their project. Team members are April Ahn, Jessica Dow, Lucas Onsgard, John Rice, Philip Tylman, Song Wang and Jongkwan Woo. Their advisor is Stewart Faculty Fellow and Professor Shabbir Ahmed. United Parcel Service (UPS) is the world’s largest package delivery company. The project focused on optimizing UPS’s hub-to-hub routes for the peak holiday season. The team developed a systematic route planning approach that explicitly addresses uncertainty of load and driver availability during the peak season. The new approach is able to realize a reduction in unnecessary miles by an average of 3.4% with a potential savings of $12.1 M.

All senior students in ISyE culminate their undergraduate educational experience with the Senior Design course in order to provide firsthand experience at solving real world problems in a team environment. Students typically work in teams of six to eight individuals with 15-25 Senior Design teams running each semester. Each group is advised by an ISyE faculty member, and the faculty coordinator manages the overall course. Companies interested in submitting a project for consideration can either contact Joel Sokol, at 404 894-6484 or can post a project through the ISyE webpage at http://www.isye.gatech.edu/seniordesign/. Senior design teams look for projects before the start of the fall and spring semesters.

Thomas has been active in a wide variety of research areas including nuclear arms control, energy policy, high-energy physics, environmental sustainability, and technology assessment. Her collaborations are equally varied, including colleagues from academia, and the public and private sectors. The nature of her collaborations and diverse subject expertise has resulted in research that engages the public and has had meaningful impacts in policy making. The award will be presented at the annual Georgia Tech Faculty and Staff Honors Luncheon to be held on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

Thomas holds a joint appointment in the Stewart School and in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include energy systems, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Her current research projects include the environmental impacts of biofuels and electricity system policy and planning.

Thomas is a member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. In 2004-2005, she was the American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society, and has been a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board. She is currently a member of the board of the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and a member of the Federation of American Scientists Board of Experts. 

She has previously worked at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Thomas received a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Keskinocak is a co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), an interdisciplinary research center at Georgia Tech. CHHS aims to transform health and humanitarian systems through education, outreach and innovative solutions. In bestowing this award, the Faculty Honors Committee recognized Keskinocak’s leadership of CHHS, as well as her efforts to promote health and humanitarian services through the professional education Certificate Program for Health and Humanitarian Supply Chain Management (HHSCM).

Letters from industry, fellow colleagues, and program graduates further underscored the value of these efforts. For example, Marta Wnorowska, supply manager with Doctors Without Borders, said, “Sometimes (especially when working in emergencies), it is not possible to find time, reflect more, and go more into details of the tools, techniques used. Training at Georgia Tech has given me this opportunity: to step back, to think more and to get a more technical approach. Overall, the training has given me an irreplaceable opportunity to improve my skills as a supply manager.”  

Former ISyE colleagues Özlem Ergun and Julie Swann are honorary recipients of the award, as they co-founded CHHS and jointly developed the HHSCM certificate program together with Keskinocak.

Keskinocak expressed her gratitude to The UPS Foundation, Andrea L. Laliberte, Pete Quinones, and Richard E. and Charlene O. Zalesky, for their generosity in providing scholarships to support a select subset of HHSCM participants. Joe Ruiz, the director of the UPS Humanitarian Relief and Resilience Program noted, “By training and mentoring professionals as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the courses and research projects, Professor Keskinocak strives to promote access to quality education in this area to improve health and humanitarian systems and human lives worldwide.”

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling, evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; and centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and health care providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and the Task Force for Global Health.

Keskinocak donated the award prize as a "seed gift" toward creating a permanent endowment in support of CHHS. If you are interested in making a gift toward the fund, in honor of the center's outstanding work, please contact ISyE's Director of Development Nancy Sandlin at nsandlin@isye.gatech.edu.

 This is where Decatur, Georgia-based nonprofit MedShare comes in: Since its inception, the organization has collected over $207 million worth of medical supplies and equipment. In 2016, according to a 2017 article in Pro Publica, “MedShare … sent 156 containers of discarded medical supplies to developing countries … each one worth as much as $175,000.”

MedShare’s challenge is that delivery of goods to medically underserved communities is based on donations, and thus the nonprofit has no control over the types of products it receives from hospitals and corporations. Additionally, MedShare serves recipient hospitals or health care organizations in nearly 100 countries, increasing the challenge of figuring out what should be sent where.

For example, said Can Zhang, different locations may need different equipment: “A maternal care hospital will need more baby warmers than will a hospital focusing on primary care.” Zhang is a recent graduate of Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and is now an assistant professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

“In this particular case,” Zhang explained, “the traditional supply chain approach of matching supply to demand doesn’t work. As a result, about 70 percent of the donated equipment ends up wasted, because they are not actually usable, or the items are inappropriate for the beneficiaries.”

Working with ISyE George Family Foundation Early Career Professor Turgay Ayer, and Dunn Family Professor Atalay Atasu and Brady Family Chair in Management Beril Toktay in the Scheller College of Business, Zhang developed a model whereby MedShare solicits “wish lists” from the recipient organizations. These groups rank needed products in order of priority, and then MedShare matches their medical product inventory to these lists. MedShare has implemented the model.

Zhang is working to further refine the matching process. Whereas in previous years, MedShare focused on quantity – the number of containers they shipped out – the nonprofit now wants to focus on quality – how many people they serve and how many lives have been improved. This shift in emphasis, Zhang said, will require more detailed measurements of welfare improvement in developing countries.

As the No. 1-ranked graduate program for industrial engineering, ISyE attracts many highly qualified Ph.D. students. Zhang is a standout, having won numerous awards for his research with MedShare (see sidebar). “I am highly motivated to work on problems that have a social perspective, especially those that concern unmet needs and underserved populations,” he said.

• Awareness: Families know that the supports and services are there and are aware of their value. 

• Accommodating: Hours of operation, cultural and language barriers, etc. 

• Affordable: Prices of the services meet the family's income and ability to pay. 

• Accessible: Location of the programs and services, proximity to public transportation, etc.

• Acceptable: Programs and services and their providers are acceptable to families

• Available: Spaces are available for all who are interested in accessing the programs and services. 

The Georgia Campaign for Grade Level Reading's focus on Access seeks to ensure that all
Georgia's children and their families have access to high-quality educational and supportive
services that enable healthy development and success in early childhood and early elementary education. Collaborative efforts are already underway to increase access to critical supports and services.

For more information on the campaign, please visit: http://gradelevelreading.net/. Please see the links below and attached brochure for more information about the Read Across Georgia Month launch as well as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and other campaign partners.

One project that Wu worked on while at ISyE – of which she still speaks with pride – was a routing project with an international pharmaceutical company. The project had eight team members from six different countries. With support from Professor John Vande Vate, they built a linear programming model that reduced unnecessary changeovers for more than 100 products and achieved a projected 300-plus working days’ savings for one of the company’s main manufacturing plants.

Wu was also able to build on her personal passion for applying supply chain principles to health and humanitarian organizations by enrolling in the Center for Health & Humanitarian System’s (CHHS) Global Logistics Scholars Program.

On a personal note, Wu is especially glad she studied at Georgia Tech: It was here that she met her now-husband, Chenliang Yang, who studied mechanical engineering (BSME 2016).

In the following interview, Wu discusses how the CHHS certification led to her current position with UNICEF as a supply chain analyst, what she does for the organization, and why it’s so important to apply supply chain principles to the work done by health and humanitarian organizations.

Why are supply chain and logistics so compelling to you?

Apart from commercial supply chain, which enables companies to maximize profit, humanitarian supply chain plays an ever-increasing role in providing essential support in the case of regional conflicts or natural disasters.

This is exactly where my passion is. Even though we have achieved great engineering advancements in terms of supporting crisis situations with cutting-edge techniques, there is more to do to optimize the entire process. Saving time and money means saving lives. I want to use my knowledge to make a difference in the world, and studying and working in supply chain and logistics can help me achieve that goal.

During your MSSCE studies at ISyE, you also earned a certification from the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) in the Global Logistics Scholars Program. Why did you do this?

The CCHS certification program and showed me what supply chain experts can do in the humanitarian arena. Prior to taking this certification program, my expertise focused more on commercial supply chain – the goal of which is profit maximization. The CHHS certification opened my eyes to humanitarian supply chain – for which the ultimate goal is minimizing human suffering.

Since graduating, you’ve been working for UNICEF in Amman, Jordan, as a supply chain analyst. What drew you to this position?

I initially found out about the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) supply chain analyst position from CHHS co-director Julie Swann. I got really excited because I knew this was the opportunity for which I had been waiting.

Given that the Middle East is where many modern conflicts take place, I realized I could devote my knowledge and skills to improving the living conditions for these local communities, especially for children.

From the first day I joined UNICEF, I have worked with colleagues from different countries; their passion for humanitarian work, as well as supply chain, has been a big influence on me.

Describe what you do as a supply chain analyst for UNICEF.

My main responsibility is to develop supply chain monitoring dashboards to alert flags and risks, and to improve supply chain visualization. We have built several dashboards to monitor procurement processes, inventory, dispatches, key grants, services contracts, and container demurrage, and so forth. I have also worked with colleagues from other departments, such as nutrition and health, to create forecasting models for critical items to predict demand. Another responsibility I have is to conduct specific supply chain-related  workshops for key UNICEF staff from different country offices in the MENA region.

Why are supply chain experts so essential to the success of health and humanitarian organizations?

More and more, people are seeing the importance of supply chain functionality in health and humanitarian organizations. Many humanitarian organizations have two “customers”: the people who need help and the donors. How to allocate donations to people in need effectively and efficiently is a question that always need to be answered.

For example, since I’ve been with UNICEF, we have procured different kinds of medications or vaccinations, which required careful, temperature-controlled transportation and storage. This is a big challenge in the hot, dry desert climate. Hence, health and humanitarian organizations really need the help of supply chain experts, to make sure that goods are handled properly – and ideally, at a lower cost. Any money saved means one more child can be helped. 

What do the next three to five years look like for you professionally?

I would like to further develop my skills in and knowledge of humanitarian supply chain, and become a supply chain expert in this area. I am also considering conducting research on resilience in humanitarian supply chain. Supply chain resilience is an important consideration for commercial supply chain in terms of response to and recovery from unexpected events; however, research into the resilience of humanitarian supply chain is much more limited.

Speaker: Derya Demirtas

https://www.isye.gatech.edu

https://chhs.gatech.edu

Public access defibrillator location under demand and supply uncertainty

Abstract

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a significant public health issue, and treatment, namely, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation, is very time sensitive. Public access defibrillation programs, which deploy automated external defibrillators (AEDs) for lay responder use in an emergency, reduce the time to defibrillation and improve survival rates. In the first part of the talk, I will present the models we developed to guide the deployment of AEDs in public settings. Our models generalize the maximal covering location problem and are motivated by real-world views on AED retrieval behavior by lay responders during a cardiac arrest emergency. We formulated three mixed integer nonlinear models and derived either equivalent integer linear reformulations or easily computable bounds. A case study where we apply our modeling framework to data from Toronto, Canada will also be presented. In the second part of the talk, I will talk about an ongoing work on a brand-new location problem where both demand (OHCA) and supply (AED and lay responder) locations are subject to uncertainty. This new problem is inspired by a Dutch civilian response smart phone app which alerts volunteers when an OHCA occurs in the vicinity and directs them to first a nearby AED and then to the victim. I will propose a comprehensive modeling framework which combines spatial data analytics, optimization and geographical information systems (GIS) modeling. This framework is primarily motivated by the AED deployment in the Netherlands but can be extended to various other settings in which demand and supply locations are uncertain, such as emergency planning and humanitarian logistics.

Bio

Derya Demirtas is a visiting faculty in the Industrial and Systems Engineering and in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She received her BSc in Industrial Engineering with a double major in Computer Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey (2008). She then obtained her MMath in Combinatorics & Optimization from the University of Waterloo, Canada (2010), and her PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada (2016). She received the second place in the INFORMS Section on Public Sector Operations Research (PSOR) best paper competition in 2012. She was recognized by the American Heart Association with the Young Investigator Award in 2015, and won the best poster abstract presentation award by the National Association of EMS Physicians (NAEMSP) in 2016.

 Along with serving as the George Chair, Keskinocak is also the Advance Professor for the College of Engineering; the associate director of research for the Health Systems Institute, and the co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. Before joining the ISyE faculty in 1999, Keskinocak also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Her research focuses on applications of operations research and management science with societal impact (particularly health and humanitarian applications) and supply chain management, with an emphasis on resource allocation, revenue management, production planning/scheduling, and logistics/transportation. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1991 and 1992, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997.

Kim Kurtis, who has served as CoE’s associate dean for faculty development and scholarship since 2014, has been named interim chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, effective July 1, while a search for a new school chair is being conducted.

“Pinar will do an outstanding job in her new role as interim associate dean for the College of Engineering, and we are grateful to her for stepping into this complex and important role,” said May. “We look forward to Pinar’s leadership in this area .”

Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management 

REGISTER ONLINE: https://chhs.gatech.edu/professional-education

The Georgia Tech Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) offers a professional certificate program designed for practitioners in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, industry, and military who are active participants in humanitarian operations including disaster response, long term development and public health operations.  

Courses include many interactive components, such as case studies, simulations and games, which help professionals to link the challenges and decision-making tradeoffs they face in everyday practice with the systematic approaches, tools, and techniques presented in the course. Upon completion of the requirements for the three courses, participants will receive an official certificate from Georgia Tech in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management.

2018 courses:

• Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations MAY 14-15
• Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response MAY 16-17
• Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response MAY 18-19

Register Now for our discounted rate by: Wednesday, April 4 2018

We are pleased to announce registration is now open for The 10th annual Conference on Health and Humanitarian Logistics (HHL), an open forum that annually attracts 250+ professionals active in the global health and humanitarian sectors from around the world to discuss the challenges and new solutions in disaster preparedness and response, long-term development and humanitarian aid, and global health delivery.

Hosted in Dubai, United Arab Emirates July 18-19, the agenda will feature:

• Keynote addresses
• Panel discussions
• Interactive workshops
• Oral Presentations
• Poster Sessions
• Tour visits to local health and humanitarian logistics facilities

REGISTER ONLINE: https://chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2018/registration

We look forward to seeing you at #HHL2018!

2018 Conference Co-organizers:

• Özlem Ergun, Northeastern University
• Jarrod Goentzel, Humanitarian Response Lab, MIT
• Pinar Keskinocak, Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, Georgia Tech
• Julie Swann, NC State
• Luk Van Wassenhove, Humanitarian Research Group, INSEAD
• Liz  Igharo, The International Association of Public Health Logisticians (IAPHL)
• Dominique Zwinkels, People that Deliver

The aim of the 10th annual Health & Humanitarian Logistics (HHL) Conference is to provide an open forum to discuss the challenges and new solutions in disaster preparedness and response, long-term development and humanitarian aid, and global health delivery. The conference platform encourages learning and collaboration within and across institutions; promotes system-wide improvements in organizations and the sector as a whole; identifies important research issues; and establishes priorities for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), corporations, and the government in terms of strategies, policies and investments.

Representatives from the humanitarian sector, government, NGOs, foundations and private industry, and academia present diverse perspectives in health and humanitarian challenges through keynote addresses, panel discussions, focused workshops, lunchtime group discussions, and interactive poster sessions covering a broad set of research topics and applications.

This is the first time, the conference will be hosted in Dubai, a staple humanitarian hub, and it is sure to bring together an abundance of professionals active in the global health and humanitarian sectors from around the world.

With the recent availability of new antiviral drugs, individuals with hepatitis C can achieve cure of their disease. Several organizations, including the National Academy of Medicine and the World Health Organization, are considering the possibility of hepatitis C elimination as a public health threat, but several barriers exist. These include lack of effective screening policies, exorbitant costs associated with scaling-up screening and treatment to a large portion of the population, and the rising incidence of hepatitis C, especially among young people who inject drugs.

Supported by the Directorates for Engineering and Computer and Information Science and Engineering through the Smart and Connected Health initiative, the National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant over four years to a team of researchers to study the elimination of hepatitis C in the United States. The interdisciplinary research team is comprised of Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Jagpreet Chhatwal, decision scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Anne Spaulding, associate professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and an infectious disease physician in the Department of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine. 

This collaborative research aims to use innovative methods from operations research to answer policy-relevant questions that could lead to hepatitis C elimination in the United States. The research will address questions such as: How should state Medicaid programs expand hepatitis C screening and treatment under their constrained budgets; what kind of screening policy should be implemented for the general population; and how would investments in high-risk groups such as people in prisons reduce hepatitis C transmission.

The interdisciplinary team will also develop practical decision-support tools for implementation and use by the stakeholders. To facilitate implementation, the researchers will partner with the Department of Health and Human Services, state and county health departments, and prison policymakers, who are the potential stakeholders of the proposed solutions and tools.

Ultimately, this innovative project has the potential to substantially reduce HCV disease burden, eventually leading to its elimination by 2030.

“NSF is pleased to support innovative, multidisciplinary research teams as they address key national challenges, such as control over debilitating diseases like hepatitis C,” said Georgia-Ann Klutke, National Science Foundation Program Director for Operations Engineering, which funds the research. “While highly successful antiviral treatments are available, eliminating the disease requires a cost-effective allocation of resources for screening and treatment.”

“Many of the pressing healthcare problems faced today are too complicated for a single academic discipline to consider and tackle,” said Ayer. “This is an exemplary interdisciplinary collaborative research effort drawing upon the expertise from several disciplines, including mathematical modeling and data analytics, public health and policy, hepatology, and correctional health; and with the holistic and innovative perspective we take, our hope is to facilitate and improve decision-making in managing the hepatitis C epidemic worldwide.”

Describing the impact of the research, Chhatwal said, “By providing decision-support tools, we believe the proposed research can aid policymakers in making policy decisions that will bring us closer to hepatitis C elimination in the United States.”

“I have been taking care of patients with hepatitis C for two decades, in both correctional facilities and the community,” added Spaulding. “We can study how addressing hepatitis C in each setting contributes to eliminating this curable disease.”   

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1722614, 1722665, and 1722906.

MedShare, the Medical Surplus Recovery Organization (MSRO) that served as the researchers’ site of research and analysis, by all accounts excels in its mission to “improve the quality of life of people and our planet.” Among the nation’s top-rated nonprofits, the Decatur-based MSRO bridges the gap between surplus and need by shipping excess medical supplies and equipment to developing countries. Since being founded in 1998, MedShare has delivered over $206 million of humanitarian aid and has helped over 19 million patients worldwide. In addition to the social impact of donations, the organization has saved 2.5 million pounds of excess medical items from entering landfills in the United States.

Medshare CEO Charles Redding, who received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech, has forged a number of relationships between his organization and alma mater. On a visit to Scheller College of Business Professor Atalay Atasu’s MBA class in supply chain management, Redding spoke about how MedShare does not fit the typical supply and demand model. Due to its never-ending mission to help those in need and its dependency on donations, MedShare has conceivably infinite demand and very limited supply. He told students how MedShare matched demand and supply: Recipients logged into the system to view current inventory and select those items with which to fill their shipping containers. He compared it to “shopping on Amazo

These exchanges led Professors Atasu and Beril Toktay each to write a case study focused on different facets of MedShare’s exciting supply chain model. Can Zhang, a PhD student in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering who is broadly interested in socially responsible operations, heard about these efforts and, along with one of his advisors, George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer, also became interested in studying MedShare. In studying the nonprofit’s operations, the four researchers discovered that allowing recipients to view and select from an online list of available inventory could create time-based competition in the ordering system, which resulted in recipients selecting and receiving medical items that might not meet their most pressing needs. Zhang applied game theory to the creation of models that would better match inventory and need. He determined that a “wish list” model would provide clarity in regard to recipients’ top priorities. Instead of displaying inventory from which recipients could “go shopping,” the wish list model would let recipients rank their priorities from a list of all potential items, but would hide actual inventory. MedShare would then be able to see which items from their current inventory would best supply which recipient—so they could service that need first.

Redding said MedShare always gives recipients surveys that include the question, “Were you able to use the equipment you ordered?” Most recipients usually answered “yes.” However, Redding noted, “We never asked the question, ‘Did we provide what you really wanted?’ We were forcing them to select from what was available as opposed to identifying what they really needed and having them wait until it was available.” He praised Zhang and the team of researchers in providing a more efficient model for delivering humanitarian aid that can do the most good for a community.

For his work on “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation,” Zhang won the 2017 POMS College of Sustainable Operations Best Student Paper Award. He is also a finalist for the 2017 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition and the 2017 MSOM Student Paper Competition. Zhang said the project excites him because of the social welfare and humanitarian angle. He said, “I’m from a small town in China, and I have been a part of the people who received aid from others. Therefore, I feel very motivated to study a problem like this—how to help people more effectively. My hope is to build an academic career where I have social impact by working on scarce resource allocation problems in nonprofits and healthcare supply chains.”

References: 

A. Atasu, B. Toktay, W.M. Yeo, C. Zhang. “Effective Medical Surplus Recovery.” Forthcoming in Production and Operations Management.

C. Zhang, A. Atasu, T. Ayer, B. Toktay. “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation.” Submitted.

To deal with the problem of HCW shortages, the TFGH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Mozambique Ministry of Health (MOH) joined forces. Involving a team from Georgia Tech in their efforts, they jointly developed a solution, called the Workforce Allocation Optimization Tool.

Currently, alumna of the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech, Sheereen Brown (BSIE 12, MSHS 14) serves as a business analyst for the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), a program of TFGH. She works with a team leading the implementation of the tool in Mozambique, while also rolling it out in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. What makes the tool particularly special is that for the first time, HCW placement preferences are taken into account.

“Previously, in Mozambique, there was a very top-down approach to allocation, without any data to drive that process,” said Brown. “There was no preference data from the HCWs — nobody got a say in where they went.”

The problem with this approach is that once HCWs were placed somewhere, they would immediately apply for a transfer so they could go to a district of their choice.

In December 2015, Mozambique’s MOH put the allocation tool in place to great success. By asking HCWs their top three preferences for placement within the country, over 75 percent of HCWs were satisfactorily placed in one of their top three preferences.

The tool’s initial beginnings were in an ISyE special projects class led by Pinar Keskinocak, who holds ISyE’s William W. George Chair. According to Keskinocak, developing the allocation tool was exactly the sort of problem tackled in ISyE. A conversation with Vivian Singletary (BSIE 95), an ISyE alumna who directs the PHII, led to giving two students in the special projects class the assignment of conceptualizing the allocation tool. Then-Tech undergraduate Emily Gooding (BSPFE 14) and master’s student Colleen Hinojosa (MSSCE 14) developed a preliminary model of the workforce allocation optimization tool for their class project. The goal behind the allocation tool’s creation was to address the question of how HCW demand could be met while improving the workers’ sense of satisfaction in their geographical placement.

After the special projects class ended, ISyE Ph.D. student Monica Villareal (IE 15), who had prior experience developing other similar decision-support solutions, worked with TFGH to further develop the tool. Villareal explained, “They needed a more robust tool.” This included reprogramming the tool to meet specific requests on the part of the Mozambique MOH, as well as testing actual data and comparing results from the initial model to the HCW actual allocation. This measured the benefits of the model. In addition, Villareal ran different scenarios to test different model data input settings, such as giving increased weight for regions with higher HIV rates.

Once Villareal completed her Ph.D. work and joined the Denver Public School System as a Senior Analyst, further implementation of the allocation tool then passed to Brown.

After graduating with her master’s degree in health systems, Brown was looking for a meaningful way to apply her IE skills and found the right environment at PHII. “In this role, I am at the intersection of people in public health; the processes and work that are done in public health; and the technology knowledge used to accomplish that work,” she said.

“ISyE teaches you to be a process thinker and to understand the critical path for how important work is accomplished. My public health colleagues are brilliant: They’re scientists, they’re doctors, they’re nurses, and they’re thinking about tackling the health side. They’re thinking about what combination of antibiotics someone with a particular disease should receive, or how many rounds of vaccine a child may still need.

“They’re not necessarily thinking about how to improve their overall processes to make them more efficient, so they can do more for more people. That’s where my team comes in.”

The Excel-based allocation tool — specifically designed this way so developing countries don’t have to spend a lot of money on expensive specialized software — tackles the HCW allocation problem from two sides: where the need is greatest and where workers want to be placed. Brown described the tool as “a way to solve the health care supply chain problem.”

“The allocation tool uses one of ISyE’s shining stars — optimization — to understand how to place this very scarce resource population [HCWs] around the country to serve the most people with the most need,” said Brown.

“It looks at population distribution across the country, the health need burden of those different populations — whether there’s a high HIV or malaria prevalence — and the demand that’s precipitated by that population. And a critical key to its success is that it also takes into account the preferences of the HCWs that it’s allocating.

“If it was just a matter of money, then these countries would hire a lot of HCWs and put them all over the country,” said Brown. “But some of these nations have financial constraints, so the allocation tool helps to put nurses, doctors, midwives, and pharmacists in the places that will have the highest impact, and places where they’ll also have a higher rate of satisfaction in that community.”

The next step is looking at the retention rate of the precious resource comprised of HCWs, based on use of the allocation tool. While official results are not in, the preliminary results look very promising. 

Currently more than 121,480 people across the United States are waiting for an organ, while 30,970 people received transplants in 2015.

In the same year, 6,648 people died on the transplant waitlist, while 6,702 were removed from the list after waiting so long that they became too sick to undergo transplant surgery.A possible resolution to this problem is to increase the availability of organs. In the past, organs with a small risk of infection were often not chosen for transplant. After several transmissions of infectious diseases that occurred through transplants where these infections (or the risk) were not detected ahead of time, use of many more organs were discouraged because of problems with understanding the risk.

A collaborative project between the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at GeorgiaTech (ISyE) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) addresses this issue of risk estimation and perception, with the goal of assessing the risk of infection in an organ donor, and evaluating the options of receiving an increased-risk donor (IRD) organ versus staying on the waitlist for a patient.

Ultimately, the goals are to reduce deaths due to organ transplants transmitting infections, boost the availability of organs without infection for transplant, and reduce the number of patients who die while on the waiting list.

The collaboration started with a Senior Design project, initially focusing on infectious encephalitis in liver transplants. Under the guidance of Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE’s William W. George Chair, and CDC subject matter experts (SMEs), the fall 2014 Senior Design team of undergraduate students in ISyE at Georgia Tech — Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker — developed two prototype tools to help physicians and their patients calculate the risk of infectious encephalitis and evaluate the benefits and risks of accepting IRD livers for transplant.

The collaboration has now grown into a $1,104,000 budgeted research project and includes a three-year, $651,000 grant from the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust. Joel Sokol, ISyE Fouts Family Associate Professor and Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree, is the principal investigator on the grant, along with co-investigators Keskinocak and a team of SMEs from the CDC. The ISyE/CDC team will enlarge the project’s scope to other organs and other infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis B and C, as well as pathogens that cause encephalitis. The ISyE investigators will also study the possibility of increased organ sharing among Georgia facilities, to improve the in-state transplant system.

In the next year or two, statistical analysis of probabilities for transmission of infections compared with survival rates for liver, heart, kidney, and lung transplants will be completed. This will be followed by a pilot study of the currently in development decision support tools in Georgia transplant centers. In addition to the grant from the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust, Georgia Tech will also provide funds toward the project’s indirect costs, and the CDC has agreed to fund a percentage of in-kind work. 

Individual states have significant independence in setting health care priorities and determining how those goals will be met through specific service offerings. But how do policymakers evaluate those decisions?

That’s a question Nicoleta Serban and Julie Swann are addressing by studying billions of transaction records from the nation’s Medicaid program. Medicaid largely addresses the needs of children, whose issues differ dramatically from those of private-sector workers and older Americans. The Georgia Tech researchers have access to eight years of complete records from 50 million patients, 38 million of them children.

“People want to make informed decisions, and we can help them make decisions based on data,” said Serban, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “Health care policies have often been set by clinicians or public health agents who are making decisions based on their experience. We can add a layer of data and health analytics to that.”

For example, in a project supported by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Serban looked at how states in the Southeast were managing asthma in children — a condition identified by the CDC as a priority. With proper diagnosis and management, acute asthma attacks can be minimized.

Based on the Medicaid data, however, she found significant differences among the states in the degree to which the disease was being managed in accordance with guidelines. In the best-performing state, 80 percent of children studied received the recommended care, while in the worst-performing state, only 30 percent of the children studied did.

The implications of care quality are significant and can be measured in costs of emergency treatment, chronic diseases carried into adulthood, time away from work for parents, and the quality of life for affected children. “If we can provide the best care now for these children, we can rely on them as adults to be healthier and more productive,” Serban said.

The findings could spur underperforming states to re-examine their policies, perhaps by looking at states that have done a better job. In some states, care for children with asthma is limited by a shortage of medical providers and practices that accept Medicaid. “We cannot charge either patients or clinicians for lack of adherence,” Serban said. “We are simply looking at compliance within the system and how to intervene.”

Serban and Swann — also a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering — have also looked at access to mental and oral health care, access to primary care, the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine, and at the potential return on investment for expanding Medicaid services to cover more preventive care for children. The Medicaid data includes personal information about patients, so Georgia Tech has an extensive protocol for securing it. For instance, the data is maintained on networks not connected to the internet, and can be accessed only in secure data review rooms from which cellphones and other electronic devices are excluded. Only Georgia Tech employees can see the information, and then only for research permitted by the agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Working out the security infrastructure and agreements for using the data took nearly two years, including the construction of secure data rooms housed at the Institute for People and Technology, a Georgia Tech interdisciplinary research institute.

“When we started, I was a bit naïve about the level of security that would be required to protect these data,” Serban said. “Now that we have established the infrastructure for this database, it is a proof-of-concept for how Georgia Tech can deal with that level of data security and data complexity.”

Mallory Soldner (Ph.D. 2014) is, in her words, “driven to push the boundaries of how to do the most good with data.” She came to Georgia Tech and the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) in 2009 specifically to focus on health and humanitarian issues by completing her graduate work with the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS). She was particularly interested in the Center’s work on cutting-edge humanitarian applications of operations research tying to social impact, led by William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor Pinar Keskinocak, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann, and Ozlem Ergun (now at Northeastern University).

Soldner is now an advanced analytics manager for UPS, where she works on research and development projects and consults within the company. Her recent TED@UPS talk, “Your Company's Data Could Help End World Hunger,” is featured on the TED website and to date has been seen almost 675,000 times.

In this interview, Soldner discusses her passion for solving humanitarian issues and the idea of data philanthropy, which was the subject of her TED talk. (View Soldner’s TED talk here: http://bit.ly/2gLOQyp.)

Briefly describe how you began focusing on health and humanitarian issues in your graduate work at ISyE.

My research at Georgia Tech focused on how to improve decision-making in health and humanitarian operations. Application areas included optimization of the food aid supply chain, humanitarian staff reassignment, bottleneck management in transportation networks, allocation of limited resources (e.g., blood or vaccines), malaria prevention logistics, and HIV clinic integration. 

One of the best things about ISyE’s CHHS is its collaborations with real-word projects. During my first year at ISyE, I began working at the UN World Food Programme (WFP), where I worked for the next four years developing prototype decision support tools for routing, port bottleneck management, and food basket design/pipeline planning. The work took me from my tiny office at ISyE, to the WFP headquarters office in Rome, Italy, and on the ground in Zambia to witness supply chain movements firsthand. These humanitarian issues interest me because an engineering approach to get the most from every aid dollar translates into lives saved.

You recently gave a TED talk on how private companies could contribute data and decision scientists to aid humanitarian efforts. You called this “data philanthropy.” First of all, define what a decision scientist does, and please explain what data philanthropy is and how – in your words – “this is the future of corporate social responsibility.”

A decision scientist transforms pressing concerns into mathematical models that can help address the question at hand with the data available. Decisions can then be informed by the models or the insights generated by the models, which can lead to better choices.

My TED talk focuses on data philanthropy — companies donating their data, their decision scientists, and their technology to capture new sources of data. Data philanthropy is a modern extension of traditional corporate philanthropic activities.

Over the past decade, there has been a paradigm shift in how companies donate; it is no longer just about writing a check. Instead, there is an increased focus on sharing expertise and partnering. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact data can have on the humanitarian sector.

In your TED talk, you described a younger, highly optimistic Mallory who came to the UN World Food Programme in Rome with the intention of solving world hunger. As you say in your talk, your initial efforts were not successful. In spite of what could be considered a failure in this regard, what were your most important takeaways from this experience?

The real world faces many problems that an idealistic student assumes have already been solved. For example, you can have the perfect mathematical model, but if you do not have access to the necessary data that the model assumes, then you have to go back to the drawing board.

This was the case with the first prototype model that I took to Rome, but it wasn’t the end of the story. We continued to get feedback on the initial model and continued to refine the decision-making scope (e.g., changing from daily routing decisions to monthly tactical decisions). We also adapted the model for the available data, which led to a new prototype at the end of my time at WFP. The prototype was eventually implemented and impacts food aid operations touching millions of lives.

The single biggest takeaway from the experience was the importance of long-term partnerships and persistence. When you hit a wall, learn from it, and don’t be afraid to try a different approach.

Why did you move from the nonprofit sector to working for UPS?

Being in the private sector gives me the opportunity to be at the forefront of applying models and data to make better decisions. It’s a fascinating environment for someone like me who enjoys seeing theory being adapted for practical applications. Through the UPS Foundation, I have also been able to stay connected to the humanitarian sector, which makes it the best of both worlds.

What is the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of your current job?

I work with a bright team of other academics turned practitioners on a variety of R&D and internal consulting projects. One aspect of the job that I have really enjoyed is getting to work with many different parts of the business, from marketing to operations to pricing. In addition to interesting logistics and modeling problems, I am exploring avenues for larger data philanthropy projects in the humanitarian sector.

What are some of the biggest problems in the humanitarian sector that IEs will be working on in the next five years?

IEs can have an impact on many different areas in the humanitarian sector.

One trend I see is an increase in beneficiary-level data, whether that is from cellphones, Twitter, or even donated private sector package scanners. This data gives visibility to the final mile and handover point of the humanitarian supply chain and is rich with potential application areas to improve forecasting and streamline operations. 

Another interesting topic where IEs can have an impact is on coordinating the different humanitarian organizations’ responses together to maximize their impact. It is still the early days of making use of data for challenging problems in the sector, which makes it all the more important for engineers to get involved.

What do you see as your career trajectory for the next 5-10 years?

Over the next 5-10 years, I want to keep solving challenging business problems, expanding my analytics toolkit and experiences, and continuing to be an evangelist for data philanthropy. I was really inspired a couple of months ago when I visited Civic Hall in New York City, which is a collaborative workspace dedicated to projects for public good. I would like to explore whether a similar environment could be created in Atlanta if we tapped into and fostered the local Data for Good community.

WHERE: UN City, Copenhagen

WHAT: Panels and interactive sessions focusing on topics such as:

• Global Health Emergencies

• Innovation and Influencing Markets

• Strengthening Health Supply Chains

TO REGISTER ONLINE please visit chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/registration. 

*As the 2017 conference will be hosted at the United Nations City, it will be free of charge. All attendees must be registered online prior to the event and must present an official form of government-issued photo ID to enter the UN City conference venue.

OVERVIEW:

The HHL Conference is pleased to announce the opening Keynote address from Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations, Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO) in geneva, who led the Ebola Response from October 2014 to January 2016 as the Director at the WHO HQ. Dr. Brennan now oversees WHO’s response to health emergencies globally as part of the new Emergencies Programme which brings together several departments to streamline WHO’s role in emergencies globally, from prevention and preparedness to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks. See full bio here.

Each year the Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics (HHL) provides an open forum for the discussion of challenges and new solutions in disaster preparedness and response, long-term development and humanitarian aid, and global health delivery. This neutral platform encourages learning and collaboration within and across institutions; promotes system-wide improvements in organizations and the sector as a whole; identifies important research issues; and establishes priorities in terms of strategies, policies and investments.

Speakers and participants in the event come from across global health and humanitarian sectors, from governments, NGOs, foundations, private industry, and academia, and share diverse perspectives in health and humanitarian challenges. The agenda features keynote addresses, panel discussions, focused interactive workshops, oral presentations, lunchtime group discussions, and interactive poster sessions covering a broad set of research topics and applications.

Submissions were accepted for 3 categories this year: interactive workshops, oral presentations, and posters, which explore challenges and solutions for building efficient and effective supply chains for health and humanitarian challenges. Particular topics of interest include public private partnerships, innovative uses of data or technology, and creating sustainable supply chain systems.More information about these sessions is available here. The final list of presentation, workshop sessions, and posters will be online at the links here as they are confirmed.

2017 Conference Co-organizers:

• Özlem Ergun, Northeastern University
• Jarrod Goentzel, Humanitarian Response Lab, MIT
• Etleva Kadilli, UNICEF Supply Division, Copenhagen
• Pinar Keskinocak, CHHS, Georgia Tech
• Julie Swann, CHHS, Georgia Tech
• Luk Van Wassenhove, Humanitarian Research Group, INSEAD

2017 Speakers and presenters include representatives from:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, (CDC), Central Medical Stores Trust of Malawi, Chemonics International, DHL, Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) Pakistan, GS1 Nigeria, Global Scientific Solutions for health, Imperial Health Sciences, John Snow Inc., Laerdal Global Health, Logistimo India, Medecins Sans Frontieres, National Medical Stores Uganda, National Primary Health Care Development Agency of Nigeria, Nexleaf Analytics, North Star Alliance, Partnership for Supply Chain Management, UCLA, Vienna University of Economics and Business,  UNICEF Supply Division, UN World Food Programme, UPS, World Health Organization, USAID, and more.

The negative effect of emergencies is disproportionally high on low income or vulnerable populations, complicating ongoing needs in health, nutrition, education, and other key areas. Whether an emergency or a long term development challenge, there are often many actors, limited resources, variability and uncertainly, and potential disruptions in the demand and supply chains. All of these factors highlight the importance of logistics and supply chain management in these contexts.

In light of these grand challenges, the annual Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics provides an open forum to discuss new solutions in health systems, disaster preparedness and response, and long-term development.  Co-organized by the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) at Georgia Institute of Technology, INSEAD, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, and Northeastern University, the conference offers a unique platform for participants to discuss challenges, share best practices, and explore potential collaborations, with the goal of enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in health and humanitarian systems, and ultimately improving and saving lives around the world.

2017 marked the 9^th year of the conference, which took place during June 7-9, in Copenhagen, Denmark at the UN City, hosted and co-organized by the UNICEF Supply Division. The event drew over 200 attendees from 39 countries and 127 organizations, including non-governmental organizations and UN agencies as well as government, industry, foundations, and academia.

The agenda featured 3 plenary panel sessions and 53 break-out presentation and workshop sessions led by practitioners and thought leaders on current challenges and solutions in health and humanitarian logistics. 31 posters were presented, providing a platform for networking and discussions around new tools and implementations.

Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations for the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergencies Programme division, delivered the opening keynote, and addressed the role of logistics in health and humanitarian response and the importance of global, national and local capacity building, cross-sector collaboration and partnerships, and performance measurement. Brennan led the Ebola Response as the Director at the WHO headquarters from October 2014 to January 2016 and now oversees the organization’s response to global health emergencies as part of the new Emergencies Programme, from preparedness and prevention to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks.

Plenary panel sessions included presentations focused on: 1) Global Health Emergencies; 2) Innovation and Influencing Markets; and 3) Ensuring Sustainability of Supply Chain Systems Strengthening Interventions. Keynote and plenary presentations are available on the conference website: chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/program/panels.

Participants were active on Twitter (#2017HHLConf) throughout the event, sharing points and reflections, reacting to the presentations and workshops. Participants also commented that the conference was “very educational and allowed for great networking among participants” and “the workshops were well-organized, insightful, and very informative.”

The conference could not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from key partners such as the UPS Foundation, the premiere sponsor for the 9^th year, Imperial Health Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, the William David Institute at the University of Michigan, and the Partnership for Supply Chain Management.

Efforts to launch the theory-focused institute were supported by the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) with faculty from the Colleges of Engineering, Sciences and Computing. Xiaoming Huo, principal investigator and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), will serve as the executive director of TRIAD. “The establishment of TRIAD is tremendously beneficial considering data science is a phenomenon that brings with it so many opportunities. There is a lot of research that needs to be conducted in this emerging field, and we will focus on building the theoretical foundations to establish the principles of data science,” said Huo.

“With the launch of TRIAD and the already well-established NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub, Georgia Tech plays a key role nationally in data science from theory to applications to building community partnerships,” said Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of IDEaS and a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

Dana Randall, fellow co-executive director and professor in the School of Computer Science, said, “Advances in data science foundations can lead to revolutionary new solutions for analyzing data. TRIAD will accelerate this research by bridging fields to expand our collective capabilities.”

Both Aluru and Randall serve as co-principal investigators of TRIAD, along with Prasad Tetali, a professor in the School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science, and Jeff Wu, the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and a professor in ISyE. “The emphasis on theoretical foundations (of data science) offers a great opportunity for mathematicians to actively engage with other scientists and help make breakthroughs in this fast growing interdisciplinary field," said Tetali.

The analysis of massive, dynamic, noisy and complex data arising in virtually every sphere of human activity is a pressing problem of our time. NSF is responding by dedicating $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes, including TRIAD. Encompassing 14 institutions in 11 states, these projects will promote long-term research and training activities in data science that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

“Data is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation,” said Jim Kurose, NSF assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). “These new TRIPODS projects will help build the theoretical foundations of data science that will enable continued data-driven discovery and breakthroughs across all fields of science and engineering.”    

According to NSF, the TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, enhanced visualization capabilities and more. They also support innovative educational pathways to train the next generation of data scientists.

TRIAD will bring together senior, mid-career and junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and data science practitioners at large using focused working groups, national and international workshops and organized innovation labs. It will build an intellectual atmosphere to connect stakeholders from across the nation and the world on a regular basis.

Initially, TRIAD will focus on four research topics: advanced mathematical modeling for contemporary data; new inferential strategies that can be both scalable and de-centralized; efficient optimization tools with theoretical guarantees; and applications in the context of large datasets from domains including biology, design, manufacturing, logistics and sustainability.

TRIAD will launch with 39 committed faculty members from across Georgia Tech, including from ISyE, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Mathematics, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Computational Science and Engineering and the School of Computer Science.

NSF’s award establishes TRIAD as a Phase I investment. It may be subsequently expanded to Phase II through a second competitive proposal process.

Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) could help revolutionize the treatment of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and other disorders by enabling broad use of potentially curative therapies that utilize living cells – such as immune cells and stem cells – as “drugs.” Examples of these highly promising therapies include T cell-based immunotherapies for blood cancers, such as the one developed at the University of Pennsylvania and approved in August by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, and a gene-modified stem cell therapy recently approved in Europe for a form of the so-called “bubble boy” syndrome.

To facilitate the widespread application of these cutting-edge emerging treatments, CMaT will develop robust and scalable technologies, innovative analytical tools, and engineering systems that will enable industry and clinical facilities to reproducibly manufacture efficient, safe and affordable cell-therapy products. The center, one of four ERCs announced September 12 by the NSF, will also develop improved models for a robust supply chain, storage and distribution system for these therapeutic cell products.

Ben Wang, Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, are Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) faculty members who are involved with CMaT. Wang and White’s research will focus on developing approaches that will enable the manufacture, storage, and distribution of these cell products, continuing their research already underway that is supported by the Marcus Foundation. Other ISyE faculty members may become involved with CMaT in the future.

“For over 30 years, NSF Engineering Research Centers have promoted innovation, helped to maintain our competitive edge, and added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “They bring together talented innovators and entrepreneurs with resources from academia, industry and government to produce engineers and engineering systems that solve real-world problems.  I am confident that these new ERCs will strengthen U.S. competitiveness for the next generation and continue our legacy of improving the quality of life for all Americans.”

In addition to the consistent manufacture of  cell-based therapies, the public-private CMaT initiative will also help develop a skilled, diverse and inclusive bio-manufacturing workforce through extensive education and training activities at the K-12, technical college, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels.

Living cells become “drugs”

“Unlike pharmaceuticals and other products now used in medical treatments, cells are living entities whose properties can significantly change depending on nuances in the way they are grown, stored or otherwise manipulated,” said Krishnendu Roy, director of CMaT and the Robert A. Milton chair professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The center will develop new engineering tools and scalable methods to better characterize, expand, differentiate, separate, transport and store high-quality cells so they provide consistent therapeutic effects, allowing them to be used in standardized therapies by clinicians to serve large numbers of patients worldwide.”

Beyond Georgia Tech, the center will include major partners – the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus – as well as affiliate partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, the Gladstone Institutes, and Michigan Technological University. Additional international academic partners, as well as industry and the U.S. national laboratories, will also be critical collaborators in the effort.

Moving discoveries into application

“Georgia Tech has a long history of building collaborative partnerships with industry, the national labs and other research universities. With the support of the NSF and this new ERC, we will be able to capitalize on expertise in multiple areas, taking transformative research from the laboratory to practice much more quickly,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “The Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies will also help us educate, train and prepare the workforce in a new industry, thereby continuing to strengthen the U.S. economy.”

Clinical trials have already established the effectiveness of several cell-based therapies and many other trials are underway. But for these exciting therapies to advance into broad healthcare use, the cells will have to be produced in much larger quantities and with more consistent quality than is now available. There are also very few, if any, established industry standards for analytics and processes in cell manufacturing, which hinders consistent production of safe and efficacious cells. Another key limitation identified by industry is the need for a highly-trained workforce.

CMaT would address these barriers through transformative innovations that build upon a series of earlier efforts, including the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium (NCMC) roadmap, infrastructure established at Georgia Tech with support from the Marcus Foundation, quality and other standards programs from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and independent industry-led bodies, and translational activities by industry, entrepreneurs and other partners.

The NSF’s multidisciplinary engineering research centers address unique, complex engineering challenges by stimulating knowledge and tech transfer between different sectors, from electronics to energy to infrastructure. Each center takes on a specific engineering research challenge.

“The overall goal of the NSF Engineering Research Centers program is nothing less than to revolutionize engineering research and education in the United States,” said Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for engineering. “We look forward to the exciting advances and outcomes in these important areas.”

Accelerating clinical trials

Beyond established cell-based therapies, the work of CMaT should accelerate the development of new therapies and the testing needed to bring them into the clinic, said Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC). Regenerative medicine applications could offer new ways of treating diseases for which there are now essentially no treatments, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke.

“There are a significant number of cell therapy clinical trials and investments in the field,” Stice said. “But there is little or no investment in a set of consistent standardization methods to optimize how these therapies should work. For instance, we know that cell therapies will improve human health, but right now it’s difficult to guarantee that each dose produced will be as potent as the next. The work done by CMaT researchers will help solve some of these problems.”

The University of Pennsylvania develops cellular therapies and has conducted more than 40 clinical trials of cell-based therapies, including those for engineered T cell therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. An example is recently-approved treatment for relapsed and refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia in pediatric and young adult patients.

“The cell and gene therapy fields are on the cusp of multiple regulatory approvals in the near term,” said Bruce Levine, Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The challenges ahead lie in developing manufacturing and testing processes incorporating automation that can bring costs down and allow access to more patients.”

Developing broad-based innovations

Critical innovations often occur at the boundaries of disciplines, and CMaT will bring together relevant specialties for both research and workforce development, noted Madeline Torres-Lugo, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.

“Due to the complexity of cells as living organisms, a team with a strong background in biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and engineering is required for this initiative,” Torres-Lugo said. “Our participation and contribution to CMaT will ensure that Puerto Rico not only remains at the forefront of pharma manufacturing, but also supports cell manufacturing technologies here and around the world by educating highly talented engineering students.”

CMaT testbeds have been selected to address several cell types that are in early stages of clinical adoption or moving toward clinical applications, but it isn't yet clear what cell types will have the greatest therapeutic impacts, noted Sean Palecek, the Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Therefore, one of the center’s challenges will be to ensure that fundamental discoveries, and tool and technology development efforts, will apply to multiple cell types.

“Our work will provide safer and more potent cell products that will allow clinical studies to establish the effectiveness of these cells as therapeutics,” Palecek said. “In addition, our work on scaling cell production will enable manufacturing of sufficient numbers of cells to replace damaged organs, such as the loss of heart muscle after a heart attack, at a cost that makes these therapies accessible to broad segments of society. We will also train the future leaders of the emerging therapeutic cell manufacturing industry. These students and their work establishing this industry will be the most significant impact of CMaT.”

New centers among 19 ERCs

Since the program’s inception in 1985, NSF has funded a total of 74 ERCs and will support 19 in this fiscal year, including four new centers. Each center receives NSF funding for up to 10 years. During this time, centers build partnerships with industry, universities and other government agencies that will sustain them for years to come.

In May, the National Academies published a report, “A new vision for center-based engineering research,” which was the result of an NSF-funded study to examine the future of the NSF ERC program.

The report identifies and recommends strategies to enable NSF multidisciplinary engineering research centers to continue addressing key research, education and innovation needs of the United States in a changing global context.

“ERCs are widely known as outstanding examples of successful partnerships between universities, private industry and government that have made significant contributions to address national challenges,” said Don Millard, acting division director for the NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “We are continually working with the scientific and engineering communities, as well as private industry and government partners, to ensure NSF-funded centers and grantees are best-equipped to match societal needs with research abilities.”