Tepper School of Business Students, Alumni Garner Accolades at INFORMS

At its annual meeting in October 2022, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) awarded distinctions to several members of the Tepper School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University community.

The organization is the leading international association for professionals in operations research and analytics, areas in which Carnegie Mellon students, faculty, and alumni excel. It comes as no surprise that accolades were earned in multiple areas.

Student Chapter Recognition

The Tepper School’s INFORMS Student Chapter was honored with recognition at the magna cum laude level for the sixth consecutive year.

The organization seeks to build a strong community and support system with Carnegie Mellon students studying operations research and related areas in decision and data science. It holds events and provides opportunities to help students learn about, and pursue careers in, these fields.

One Paper, Three Accolades

Yanhan (Savannah) Tang, a Ph.D. student in Operations Management, was the lead author of the paper “Split Liver Transplantation: An Analytical Decision Support Model” which earned several accolades:

• First Place - 2022 INFORMS DEI Best Student Paper Award.
• Winner - INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research 2022 Best Paper Award.
• Finalist - IBM Best Student Paper Award Competition.

The paper explored fluid models in split liver transplantation (SLT), a procedure that can save two lives with a single organ yet is rarely used in the U.S. Tang’s research provided theoretical and experimental results demonstrating how SLT could improve utility and fairness as well as stimulate more detailed analyses in the operations research and transplantation communities.

The work was a collaboration with transplant surgeons at the University of California, San Francisco and the Tepper School’s Alan Scheller-Wolf, the Richard M. Cyert Professor of Operations Management, and Sridhar Tayur, Ford Distinguished Research Chair and University Professor of Operations Management.

Another paper of Tang’s, “Multi-Armed Bandits with Endogenous Learning and Queueing: An Application to Split Liver Transplantation,” was a finalist for the 2022 INFORMS Service Science Best Cluster Paper Award. It was co-authored by Andrew Li, Assistant Professor of Operations Research, Scheller-Wolf, and Tayur.

George B. Dantzig Award

Su Jia (MSIA 2019, Ph.D. 2022), an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon’s multidisciplinary doctoral program in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization, received the George B. Dantzig Award for his thesis, “Learning and Earning Under Noise and Uncertainty.” His advisors were Andrew Li and R. Ravi, the Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business, Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science, and Director of Analytics Strategy.

Jia explored practical sequential decision-making problems that arise from fundamental areas in marketing and provided theoretical insights through provable performance guarantees. He is now an Assistant Research Professor in the Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society at Cornell University.

George Nicholson Student Paper Competition

Issac Grosof and Ziv Scully (MS/CS 2020, Ph.D./CS 2022) earned first place in the George Nicholson Student Paper Competition for their research, “The Gittins Policy is Nearly Optimal in the M/G/k under Extremely General Conditions.” Grosof is a Computer Science doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. Scully is now a research fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.

INFORMS Computing Society Leadership

Thiago Serra (MSIA 2015, Ph.D. 2018) was elected vice chair/chair-elect of the INFORMS Computing Society. Having earned his doctoral degree in Operations Research from the Tepper School, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Business Analytics at Bucknell University where he researches neural networks.

Volunteer Service Award

Canan Gunes Corlu (MSIA 2008, Ph.D. 2010) received the 2021 INFORMS Volunteer Service Award for a decade of work in the organization. Among her roles, she served as a mentor in the INFORMS Women in Operations Research and Management Science Mentorship program and as treasurer of the INFORMS Simulation Society.

Earning her Ph.D. in Operations Management from the Tepper School, she is now an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of Supply Chain Management Programs at Metropolitan College, Boston University.