My research collaboration with ORC students, both doctoral and master’s, has been the most exciting part of my career at MIT. Together, we have made journeys to many sectors, including public safety (police, fire, and ambulance), sanitation, energy management, transportation, inventory management, homeland security, and many more. Along the way, we have framed and formulated new OR models, often with accompanying new methods that generalize to other domains. These new methods have involved a variety of OR sectors, including queueing, graphs, facility location, supply chains, and optimization.

A recent example is our CDC-sponsored research on modeling the progression of pandemic influenza, and showing how the changing human behavior can significantly lower the risk of becoming infected with the flu. We also derived a new way to deploy flu vaccines in the presence of a new (novel) flu virus. If this method had been used in 2009, we estimated that the 5 million Americans who became infected with the H1N1 virus would have avoided the disease.