Evelyn Xiao-Yue Gong is an Assistant Professor of OM at Tepper. She has a PhD from the ORC at MIT, where she was advised by David Simchi-Levi and Jim Orlin. She spent summers at Google Research, Microsoft, HelloFresh, and DE Shaw. Her main research pertains to AI for supply chain and sustainability. She also works on assortment optimization and data-driven decision making.

In the first half of the episode, we discuss her journey from being a PhD student to an assistant professor.

In the second half of the episode, we discuss her research on reinforcement algorithms, and some recent work on using these algorithms to solve a problem for packaging at HelloFresh.

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Mariana Escallon Barrios is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Information Systems at CMU in our Heinz College. She earned her PhD in IEMS from Northwestern where she was advised by Karen Smilowitz. She worked on modeling and solution approaches to logistics problems in nonprofit settings. She is an active member of INFORMS and WORMS.

We discuss her decision to become a teaching professor at CMU, her research on scheduling volunteers at a nonprofit, her research on harvesting operations at an oil palm plantation, and her teaching philosophy.

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Woody (Shixiang) Zhu is an Assistant Professor of data analytics at Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He received his PhD in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech in ISyE. He develops models for spatio-temporal data and dynamic networks, and decision making under uncertainty. He was a finalist for the 2021 INFORMS Wagner prize and won second place in the 2019 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR.

First 1/2:
We discuss Woody's decision to pursue a PhD in ML at Georgia Tech, and we discuss Woody's decision to become a professor at CMU.

Second 1/2:
We talk about two of Woody's recent papers. One work titled Counterfactual Generative Models for Time-Varying Treatments and the other titled Data-Driven Optimization for Atlanta Police Zone Design.

Enjoy!