I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and attended Penn State University for my undergraduate and masters studies in mathematics and statistics. I enjoyed math throughout high school and college, but knew that I didn’t want to pursue theoretical math. I didn’t hear about Operations Research until my third year of undergrad when I began working with a math professor with a background in OR. To this day I am extremely grateful for this mentor, who introduced me to a field that would allow me to apply my love of math to complex problems in domains that I was interested in.

After graduating with my master’s degree, I took a job at Booz Allen Hamilton working as a data scientist on a healthcare project. After only a couple months at this job, I missed research and an academic environment, and immediately applied to PhD programs.

The MIT and the ORC of course have amazing faculty and an unparalleled learning environment, but the student population was the main reason why I chose the ORC. The students at the ORC are extremely bright, collaborative, social, and engaging. I graduated from the ORC not only with a PhD, but also with a group of lifelong friends and collaborators.

At the ORC I was co-advised by Retsef Levi and Georgia Perakis, who taught me to always strive for positive, real-world impact. With them, I worked on problems related to food policy and access to fresh food. This research agenda required a large set of analytical tools (causal inference, mathematical modeling, optimization, etc.), and led to many partnerships with non-profits and public entities. Working on real-world, impactful problems with deeply passionate partners kept me motivated throughout the PhD, and continues to be my research goal going forward.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab, where I work on optimizing programs to assist the integration of newly arriving refugees in their host countries. In this role, I am able to apply the skills and research philosophy that I learned at MIT to a very new application setting. After one year in this position, I will join the faculty of Harvard Business School as an Assistant Professor. I look forward to continuing my research at the intersection of analytics and public policy, and to becoming a teacher. The mentorship that I received from my advisors, tools that I honed, and relationships that I built while a student at the ORC have led me to this exciting next chapter, and for that I am forever grateful.