Pittsburgh,
28
March
2017
|
00:00 AM
Europe/Amsterdam

Pitt IE Professor Lisa Maillart Awarded Fulbright Scholarship to the Netherlands

Lisa Maillart

PITTSBURGH, PA (March 28, 2017) … Lisa Maillart, associate professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, was named a Fulbright Scholar to Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands. Through her Fulbright award, Dr. Maillart will collaborate with researchers at TU/e on multiple projects related to maintenance optimization in healthcare, and she will teach a graduate course on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs).

Dr. Maillart’s focus in applied probability as well as MDPs and Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) influences her research in maintenance optimization, healthcare operations and medical decision-making.

“Dr. Maillart’s expertise on MDPs and in particular POMDPs will be a great benefit for us,” said Geert-Jan van Houtum, professor of maintenance, reliability and quality at TU/e. “We aim to work together on multiple joint papers, and the ambition will be to get them published in top journals in our field. With Dr. Maillart in our team, we will increase our possibilities to realize such top publications.”

Dr. Maillart’s research at TU/e will be heavily driven by data supplied by the multinational Dutch electronics corporation Philips, which has a research facility headquartered in Eindhoven, Netherlands. She will collaborate with personnel from Philips Research and the faculty and students of Eindhoven University to gain a better understanding of smart maintenance approaches for healthcare systems and personalized health. Many healthcare settings require sequential decision making to manage systems that deteriorate randomly over time—for example, large-scale medical equipment or a chronically ill individual. Dr. Maillart will examine how new types of data can be analyzed to improve the decision making process for these complex problems.

The new course on Markov Decision Processes will potentially expand into a permanent course at TU/e. Dr. Maillart will be instrumental in helping the faculty design the curriculum. She will also be involved in the supervision of PhD and master thesis research projects while visiting TU/e.

About Lisa Maillart
Lisa Maillart is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Stochastic Modeling, Analysis and Control (SMAC) Laboratory in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the faculty at Pitt, she served on the faculty of the Department of Operations in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. She received her MS and BS in industrial and systems engineering from Virginia Tech, and her PhD in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. Her primary research interest is in sequential decision making under uncertainty, with applications in medical decision-making, healthcare operations, healthcare policy and maintenance optimization. She is a member of INFORMS, SMDM and IIE, and was recently named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar.

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Author: Matt Cichowicz, Communications Writer

Contact: Paul Kovach