Saving lives with smarter decisions: Operations Research in animal shelters

Joining me today is Katalia Chen, recipient of INFORMS Doing Good with Good O.R/ Award, which recognizes outstanding work using operations research to create meaningful social impact. Katalia’s research tackles a question that affects hundreds of thousands of animals every year: how can we help animal shelters make better decisions when resources like kennel space, staff time, and foster homes are limited? By combining operations research, optimization, survival analysis, and causal inference, her work demonstrates that smarter allocation of these scarce resources can dramatically increase the number of lives saved – without building new facilities or increasing capacity.

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The Opioid Epidemic: Using OR/MS to combat the leading public health crisis

The opioid epidemic is a decades long public health crisis that is only continuing to grow in severity and impact. It is currently the foremost public health crisis in the United States, with its roots tracing back to mid to late 1990s when the highly concentrated prescription pain killer Oxycontin was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in conjunction with the controversial pain as the fifth vital sign campaign, among other factors. As the U.S. government, healthcare system, and general public struggle to combat this epidemic, members of the OR/MS and analytics community are leveraging data and research…

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