Amaya McNealey is a fourth-year Industrial Engineering Ph.D. student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is currently being advised by Dr. Jovan Julien and Dr. Nicoletta Serban. Her research focuses on addressing clinical and public health challenges using data science, statistical modeling, and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on health policy and equity. She is especially interested in developing methodologies that promote fairness and interpretability in predictive models. Her current work examines mental health and behavioral health service utilization among youth involved in foster care, as well as the role of patient–provider racial concordance in healthcare access and outcomes.

Amaya received her B.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University. While completing her B.S. she participated in an NSF-funded REU: Growing Entrepreneurially-Minded Undergraduate Researchers with New Product Development in Applied Energy where she worked with Dr. Lisa Bosman to justify the need for solar energy monitoring products and explored the effect of solar energy implementation in the healthcare systems of rural countries.