CV in PDF format. I am primarily interested in design and control of service systems, especially with applications to health care. I am also interested in applications of Operations Research and Statistics in other fields. Dissertation Research My dissertation research is on mass-casualty triage and patient prioritization with Professor Nilay Tanik Argon and Professor Serhan Ziya. I am a Research Assistant on this project. Unlike other work in this area, we analyzed a model where patients' survival probabilities change with time. Our analytical results gave some insights into the types of triage policies that can be expected to work well in practice. We demonstrated the usefulness of our results by developing a policy called Resource-based START, or ReSTART, which extends the most commonly used mass-casualty triage method, START. I presented some of the results at the 2010 INFORMS Annual Meeting, the 2011 INFORMS Healthcare Conference, and the 2011 M&SOM Conference. We are currently working on applying similar resource-based policies to different realistic scenarios to determine its flexibility as a decision support tool in disaster response. View an extended abstract of the ReSTART paper. Download a copy of the submitted paper, "Resource-Based Patient Prioritization in Mass-Casualty Incidents". This paper is currently under revision for the journal MSOM. As part of my research in patient prioritization and emergency response, I completed the requirements to be certified as an EMT-Basic in the state of North Carolina. Real Time Systems Research I have also worked on a problem in Real-Time Systems, with Professor Jim Anderson of the Department of Computer Science. We derived tardiness bounds under global scheduling algorithms for real time task systems with probabilistic execution costs. Preliminary results were presented at the 2010 Real Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium. We showed improved (and more general) bounds when such task systems were scheduled using a server abstraction. These results were presented at the 2011 International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications. The results of the RTCSA paper proved useful when implemented in a case study by the UNC Real-Time Systems group; the case study results were presented at the 2011 Real-Time Systems Symposium. Other Cross-Disciplinary Research I am currently working with Alicia Frame, a Ph.D. candidate in Biology, on modeling condition-dependent mate choice using Markov Decision Processes. Existing theoretical mate choice models generally assume that an animal searching for a mate will make a decision based on the "fitness" of the potential mate, but ignore the fact that the individual's own fitness or condition may change over time. We allow the individual's condition to change according to a Markov chain, which makes the process of choosing to mate or to continue searching a MDP. MembershipsI am a student member of INFORMS and IEEE. |