September 25
@
12:00 PM
–
1:00 PM
UW-ISyE looks forward to welcoming Sean Sinclair from Northwestern University.
The Impact of Censoring on Data-Driven Inventory Control
Infectious diseases continue to impact millions of people every year around the world, despite many advances in medicine and technology. Pharmaceutical interventions such as testing, vaccines, or treatment, may not be available, and when they are, resources for their deployment are often very limited. Other challenges (e.g., logistical, societal) may also hamper deployment. Decisions regarding what, when, and how to deploy need to incorporate various short- and long-term considerations, as well as human behaviors such as following non-pharmaceutical intervention recommendations or uptake of available pharmaceutical interventions. In this presentation, we will illustrate these challenges using a few examples from infectious diseases that are targeted for elimination or eradication, and share results from modeling studies to help inform these complex decisions.
Bio: Sean Sinclair is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University, where he also serves as Director of Graduate Studies. His research develops reinforcement learning algorithms for operations problems, with recent interests in inventory control and scheduling. He received his PhD from Cornell University and was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT. His work received the 2026 SIGMETRICS Best Paper award, and his dissertation received honorable mention for both the SIGMETRICS Dissertation and the George Dantzig Dissertation awards.