DO&IT Seminar Series
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/doit/events/seminars.aspx
Speaker:
Professor Retsef Levi, MIT
Date:
Friday, September 19, 2014
Time:
10:00 am - 11:00 am
Location:
Room 2509
Title:
Optimizing and Coordinating Healthcare Networks and Markets
Abstract:
Healthcare systems pose a range of major access, quality and cost challenges in the U.S. and
globally. We survey several healthcare network optimization problems that are typically
challenging in practice and theory. The challenge comes from network affects, including the fact
that in many cases the network consists of selfish and competing players. Incorporating the
complex dynamics into the optimization is rather essential, but hard to models and often leads to
computationally intractable models. We focus attention to computationally tractable and
practical policies, and analyze their worst-case performance compared to optimal policies that
are
computationally
intractable
and
conceptually
impractical.
The work is based on several papers with Marcus Braun, Fernanda Bravo, Vivek Farias, Georgia
Perakis, Gonzalo Romero, Cong Shi and Wei Sun.
Bio:
Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management, Professor of Operations
Management at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He is a member of the Operations
Management Group at Sloan and affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the
Computational for Design and Optimization Program. Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in
the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder
of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from
Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University
in 2005. Levi spent more than 11 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an Officer in the
Van Munching Hall
▫
Room 4306
▫
Telephone 301-405-8654
▫
College Park, MD
▫
University of Maryland
Intelligence Wing. After leaving the Military, Levi joined and emerging new Israeli hi-tech
company as a Business Development Consultant.
Levi's current research is focused on the design and the performance analysis of efficient
algorithms for fundamental stochastic and deterministic optimization models, arising in the
context of supply chains and inventory, revenue management, logistics and healthcare
management. In addition, he is interested in stochastic and combinatorial optimization and
mathematical programming in their broad definition, and especially in their intersection with
problems that arise in the context of real-life applications. Levi is leading several collaborative
research efforts with some of the major academic hospitals in the Boston area, such as Mass
General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). He is the lead PI
on an MIT-FDA contract to develop systematic risk management approach to address risk
related to economically motivated adulterations of food and drug products. He has also been
involved in developing operational risk management methodologies for various organizations, in
the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries.
Levi received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, the 2008 INFORMS
Optimization Prize for Young Researchers and the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize. He was also
awarded several teaching awards.
Van Munching Hall
▫
Room 4306
▫
Telephone 301-405-8654
▫
College Park, MD
▫
University of Maryland