Operations Research Faculty, and Research Interests

The research of the Operations Research affiliated faculty spans diverse areas in both deterministic and stochastic fields. Faculty

interests include theoretical and computational aspects of discrete and continuous optimization, in particular interior point methods, semidefinite programming, convex analysis, variational inequalities; and theoretical and applied aspects of stochastic Operations Research, in particular discrete event simulation, stochastic models in operations management, fluid models in stochastic networks, warranty reserves and stochastic control theory. Recent graduates serve on university faculties, in high profile research institutes, and throughout a wide spectrum of industry and government organizations. We provide full financial support to all of our Ph.D. students.

For more information, and to apply to our Ph.D. program, please visit our website at http://stat-or.unc.edu/.

Nilay Tanik Argon: Professor Argon conducts research on the design and control of stochastic systems, and discrete-event simulation. She has worked on several projects in manufacturing and health care applications pertaining to the assignment of flexible resources and priority scheduling. Her work on discrete-event simulation has been primarily on the development of new methods for the analysis of steady-state simulations. Her most recent research focuses on health care operations, particularly on disaster-response and emergency-department operations.

Vidyadhar Kulkarni: Professor Kulkarni conducts an active research program in stochastic models with a wide variety of applications: health care, business operations, queueing systems, supply chain management, warranty management, telecommunications, and other areas. He is the author of a graduate textbook (Modeling and Analysis of Stochastic Systems) and of an undergraduate textbook (Introduction to Modeling and Analysis of Stochastic Systems) that are used at many US and international universities. He is the author of over a hundred scholarly publications. He firmly believes that the utilization of tools from Operations Research, Statistics, and Computer Science will form the building block of all data driven decision making solutions in the coming future, and his research projects demonstrate this belief.

Shu Lu: Professor Lu’s research is on the development of analyticaland computational techniques for continuous optimization and equilibrium problems, by using tools in convex and variational analysis, with a focus on how to handle data uncertainty. She has worked on sensitivity analysis of variational inequalities and nonlinear programs, with applications in traffic network equilibria. In a recent collaborative project, she has developed new methods to compute confidence regions and confidence intervals for stochastic variational inequalities.

Gabor Pataki: Professor Pataki’s research interests lie in the area of semidefinite programming, integer programming and convex analysis. One of his recent results is a new characterization of a classical problem in convex analysis, the closedness of the linear image of a closed convex cone. Another one of his recent results -- obtained in collaboration -- is a simple certificate of infeasibility in semidefinite programming, which generalizes the row echelon form of a linear system of equations, as it consists of a trivially infeasible subsystem obtained by elementary row operations.

Quoc Tran-Dinh: Professor Tran-Dinh works in the area of Numerical Optimization. His research interests consist of theory and numerical methods for continuous optimization and related problems such as variational inequality and equilibrium problems. Recently, he focused on numerical methods, convergence theory and computational complexity analysis for large-scale convex and nonconvex optimization with applications in control, signal/image processing, networks, and machine learning.

Serhan Ziya: Professor Ziya’s interests are broadly within the area of stochastic modeling and analysis with applications in queueing, service operations, and revenue management. Within the area of revenue management, his work has concentrated on pricing under inventory considerations and pricing as a tool for admission control in queueing systems. His work in service operations has largely been motivated by problems from healthcare. More specifically, he has worked on problems that are related to patient triage and prioritization decisions, patient flow in hospitals, appointment scheduling, and capacity analysis and control.

The Operations Research Program in the Departmentof Statistics and Operations Research

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