Grad student Adams earns award for healthcare optimization research

Katherine Adams, a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is the 2022 recipient of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

The award, considered one of the most prestigious for graduate students applying operations research and management to questions in healthcare, supports the development of promising researchers.

Adams, who is co-advised by Assistant Professors Justin Boutilier (a former Bonder Scholarship recipient) and Yonatan Mintz, uses optimization techniques to inform healthcare interventions in low- and middle-income countries—work that’s motivated by growing up in her home country of Brazil.

In her acceptance speech at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting, Adams highlighted the importance of applying operations research to global health challenges to reduce health disparities.

“About four out of every five people living with diabetes are in low- and middle-income countries, yet existing methods used to plan chronic care interventions in high-income countries are often not transferrable to those settings,” she says. “This gap requires the development of new theory. The Bonder Scholarship is supporting research on this important problem.”

Adams is currently working on a project to create personalized diabetes screening and treatment plans that can be used by community health workers in urban slums.