An Interview with Dr. Lee

The Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare

The Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, founded in 1998 through sponsorships from the National Science Foundation and the Whitaker Foundation, is a collaborative education and research center. Our mission is to foster interdisciplinary education and research efforts involving the advancement and application of sophisticated mathematical and computational techniques to problems in medicine, healthcare, and homeland security. Utilizing the wealth of methodologies and theories in operations research, systems modeling, algorithms and software design, and risk and decision theory analysis, our researchers tackle problems in biomedical informatics; predictive health; disease modeling, early diagnosis and prediction; optimal and personalized treatment design and drug delivery; target intervention and treatment outcome prediction; public health and medical preparedness; medical decision analysis; quality improvement, efficient operations, logistics associated with healthcare delivery systems, and defense of the homeland. Contact Dr. Lee at evalee-gatech@pm.me.

The Center covers a broad range of research projects. Below are some highlights.

I. Big Data Integration, Machine Learning, Evidence-based Real-time Decision Support

Big Data Analytics

• Massive, multi-source, heterogeneous, and messy

• Text, unstructured, numeric, images, multi-stakeholders

• Temporal, evolving

• Influence policies, decisions, and operations

• Facilitate real-time decisions

• Challenge traditional theory and algorithms

Multi-site multi-source Interoperability, data extraction, data cleansing and preprocessing. clustering, feature selections, and machine learning.

Multi-Source Data Integration

• Providers can make better informed decisions to provide personalized, timely, evidence-based, and appropriate care for patients

• Better outcomes are achieved at a lower cost while satisfying the needs of all stakeholders

• Patients receive timely and better quality care

• Translational researchers can be better equipped with knowledge and tools to analyze and benefit from medical data

II. Clinical Translational Research

Novel medical and healthcare advances

• Early health risk detection and disease diagnosis: chronic diseases (epigenetics/cancer, cardiovascular risk, Alzheimer's, hypertension, ...), sepsis, ....

• Drug design and treatment delivery: Prioritizing test of binding sites; predicting ultrasonic cell disruption for drug delivery; designing personalized treatment, ….

• Treatment outcome prediction: HIV/AIDs treatment; vaccine immunogenicity, target delivery, personalized evidence-based approach ….

Medical and emergency medicine systems optimization

• Optimize performance, align demand and supply, optimize resource allocation

• Improve quality and safety

• Decrease costs, reduce waste

• Decrease wait time, increase throughput, improve access

Major Theme: Develop predictive models, optimization-decision models, pattern recognition algorithms, and machine learning software to advance early diagnosis, personalized treatment, and evidence-based medicine

III. Homeland Security, Disaster Medicine, Public Health Emergency

Research Foci

• Emergency response and preparedness: Natural disasters, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents

• Vaccine: Vaccine design and development, immunogenicity prediction, mass dispensing strategies, prioritization

• Disease modeling: risk prediction, rapid containment, mass casualty mitigation, real-time dynamic resource allocation

• Defense: Protecting war-fighters, homeland security advances, threat and risk reduction, real-time decisions

• Risk detection, operations efficiency & economic analysis

• Interdependencies and cascading effects of disasters on critical Infrastructures

IV: Something Fun & Volunteering

Advice to Students

• Follow your Passion

• Be fearless

• Work hard

• Persevere

“Students should learn to develop realistic mathematical models and also learn to design algorithms to solve them.”