Research Areas

Management of Hospital Resources and Provider Workload

Our team at NC State University, along with our collaborators at Drexel University, has been working on integrating electronic health records (EHR) and clinical expertise to provide a framework to manage resources in a hospital. Specifically, we look at ways of efficiently redistributing hospital staff and routing patients to wards while ensuring that the workload experienced by the providers and staff is efficiently managed.

A Simulation Mode to assess the impacts of various interventions for colorectal cancer screening at the population level

Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is an example of a largely preventable condition, if access to and use of healthcare is increased. Along with collaborators at UNC Chapel Hill and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), we use an individual-based discrete-event simulation model to estimate the impact of various public policies on CRC screening at a population level.

Sequential Assignment Under Uncertainty

The stochastic sequential assignment problem (SSAP), studies the allocation of available distinct workers with deterministic values to sequentially-arriving tasks with stochastic parameters so as to maximize the expected total reward obtained from the assignments. The goal is to find a balance between the frameworks of exploration vs exploitation. During the course of my time at the University at Buffalo, I worked on a several variations of this problem.

Social Network Analysis

Social Network Analysis research studies the behavior of individuals embedded in social networks, and the how structure of such networks affect socio-economic events and processes. The field of SNA was the first step in my academic career in Operations Research. In Feb 2014, I attended a conference in St. Petersburg, FL of International Network for Social Network Analysis which gave me an amazing insight into the world of Social Network Analysis. The work I have done in this field is primarily introductory and include the following.

• Attempted to bridge the gap between Exponential Random Graph modeling (ERGM) and Longitudinal Network Formation modeling. The project also attempted at overcoming some fundamental challenges of ERGMs – including the issue of degeneracy.
• Assisted with a project involved in the studying of user-engagement patterns in an Online Health Social Network (smoking cessation forum) in order to develop a framework for prescriptive applied research.