Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) has announced that Pravara Harati, a first-year Ph.D. student, is the recipient of a prestigious 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Only a few fellowships were awarded for IE/OR nationwide this year, making this achievement even more special.

Harati earned her undergraduate industrial engineering degree (IE 2015) with an emphasis on quality and statistics at Georgia Tech. As an undergraduate student, she received the Henry Ford II Scholar Award and the President’s Undergraduate Research Award.

As an undergraduate researcher, Harati worked with ISyE Coca-Cola Associate Professor Nicoleta Serban, focusing on health care access. Specifically, Harati determined the supply and demand for primary care services for both children and adults. She also found that if Medicaid is expanded, overall access will not, in fact, be decreased due to higher demand and a resulting supply shortage.

As a graduate student at ISyE, Harati has continued this work, specifically in the areas of predicting a child’s risk for cavities based on demographic information and estimating the clinical risk levels for children insured by Medicaid.

About Harati’s award, Alan Erera, ISyE Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Coca-Cola Professor, said, “Pravara should be proud of her accomplishments, and she is very deserving of this honor.  We are looking forward to see how she uses this fellowship award to make a major impact in our field and on our world.”

"The Graduate Research Fellowship Program is a vital part of our efforts to foster and promote excellence in U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics by recognizing talent broadly from across the Nation," said Joan Ferrini-Mundy, NSF assistant director for Education and Human Resources. "These awards are provided to individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements, and they are investments that will help propel this country's future innovations and economic growth."

The fellowship provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period ($34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution). That support is for graduate study that leads to a research-based master's or doctoral degree in science or engineering.