After three years of virtual meetings, it was refreshing to join the in-person Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) conference in Orlando this week.
Great to be part of the College of Healthcare Operations Management board to host the mini-conference with E. David Zepeda, MBA, MS, PhD, Tinglong Dai, Nan Liu, Wiljeana Glover, Ph.D., and David Rea. Congrats to Yichuan Ding and Yiwen Jin and other co-authors for winning the best paper competition. It was a wonderful journey working with Tinglong Dai on the competition sub-committee.
I also had the pleasure to join two panels with distinguished panelists. The research and education programs panel, facilitated by David Rea, brought together different perspectives from industry (Vikram Tiwari), Ph.D. (Craig Froehle), graduate (myself), and undergraduate programs (Wiljeana Glover, Ph.D.). We discussed different approaches to building academic-industry collaborations and also shared tips and challenges. The Healthcare OM 2.0 panel, facilitated by Rajib Dutta, Ph.D. student from Arkansas, featured different topics on health IT, policy implications, and research methods. It was an eye-opening experience to discuss those topics with Anand Nair, David Dobrzykowski, and Luv Sharma.
Last but not least, is to congratulate our 2nd year Ph.D. student, Chenhao Zhou, for his first conference presentation, which was made in front of over 70 participants of the research-in-practice session at the CHOM mini-conference! Chenhao presented the simulation and optimization study that we have been working on with the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
It was great meeting all the old and new friends at the conference. I look forward to our next meeting in Minneapolis, MN!
