I am an associate professor in the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering Graduate Program in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. My current research interests focus on integrated humanitarian logistics, particularly hurricane and other extreme weather event mitigation, preparedness and recovery decision making and optimization. My main effort here is to combine predictive science-based models with prescriptive stochastic optimization models to develop an end-to-end understanding of uncertainty and optimized decision making in humanitarian logistics and disaster resilience, particularly for critical infrastructure. My students are currently working on such comprehensive modeling of two important problems: (1) the large-scale hospital and nursing home evacuation before hurricanes, and (2) the preparedness and recovery of power grids before and after heavy rainfall events including hurricanes. My research interests span manufacturing and … Read more...