Two graduate students in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering have earned fellowships with the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) at Research Participate Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They join two other ISyE Ph.D. students selected to the program in 2021.

Current Ph.D. students Arden Baxter and Daniel Kim join Akane Fujimoto and Melike Yildirim as admits to the ORISE Research Participation Program at the CDC, an educational and training program designed to provide college students, recent graduates, and university faculty opportunities to connect with the center’s unique resources.

“These are all such fantastic students,” said William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak, advisor to all four students. “It’s a competitive program and for all four to be recognized in consecutive years, it says a lot about their work.”

Baxter, who will graduate in the summer, plans to join the ORISE program immediately and work with the CDC for the next year. Her work has included Covid-19 disease modeling and evaluating intervention strategies, as well as modeling for decision-making in humanitarian systems such as emergency response for resource coordination.

Kim will take a year off for the fellowship before returning to finish his thesis. He, too, has recent work on Covid-19. Other work includes incentive mechanisms to increase post-disaster debris recycling and analysis of data on mental health medication prescribed to children.

Fujimoto will complete the ORISE program this summer and return to ISyE to finish her Ph.D., with research focusing on various topics in health systems, including pre-natal screening for Down syndrome and Covid-19 modeling and dashboards..

Yildirim finished her degree in Jan. 2021, took a postdoctoral position at Harvard, and then joined the ORISE program in Dec. 2021.