DIPAYAN BANERJEE //  Ph.D. student, Operations Research
The Graduate Research Fellowship awarded by the National Science Foundation recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing groundbreaking research, and Dipayan Banerjee fits the bill. Banerjee is studying the tactical design of last-mile delivery systems, which are a challenging supply chain problem. The last mile in a supply chain represents the transport of goods being delivered, for example, from a local warehouse to a home or business. “It’s a really exciting time to be studying transportation and logistics systems,” he said. “There are many fascinating new challenges being faced in the last mile as companies seek to deliver more and more goods on increasingly tighter deadlines. These include issues of accessibility and environmental sustainability.” Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Banerjee’s research is in high demand. “We have data and advanced computing power at our disposal that wasn’t available five or 10 years ago,” he said. “I’m excited about the opportunity to develop new operations research approaches to solving these problems.”

JOVAN JULIEN // Ph.D. student, Operations Research
Jovan Julien, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) Ph.D. student, is researching cirrhosis of the liver for their dissertation — work for which they have received the prestigious Lee B. Lusted Award from the Society for Medical Decision Making, and also been named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. Julien has been conducting a meta-analysis using nationally representative surveys of when people start drinking alcohol and how much they consume —  research that has expanded to examine drinking behaviors related to the Covid-19 pandemic. “In this unprecedented moment, my research has shifted focus to include how changing consumption of alcohol due to Covid-19 policies, making it easier to access and sell alcohol, can lead to liver disease later in life,” Julien explained. “That being said, I think my greatest impact as a graduate student has been lending my data analysis skillset to local Atlanta community efforts like the Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid (MAMA) Fund to help support those most affected by the pandemic.”

ISABELLA SANDERS // Ph.D. student, Industrial Engineering
With two Georgia Tech master’s degrees completed (geographic information systems and operations research) and an MBA and Ph.D. in progress, Isabella Sanders is an interdisciplinary superstar. She came to Tech in 2016 after earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT. “I wanted to be able to use my math undergraduate degree in an applied context, which is why I came to Georgia Tech for my Ph.D. in industrial engineering. The ISyE department has enabled me to do just that, through research collaborations with various companies — from startups to global organizations,” said Sanders. Her dissertation focuses on data-driven computational optimization and risk modeling for solving decision-making problems within supply chains in the food and defense industries. In addition, Sanders has been instrumental in reestablishing the graduate group within Georgia Tech’s section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), serving as president for the past two years. In the fall of 2020, she received the SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member award for her contributions to SWE, the engineering community, and Georgia Tech.

Edited and compiled by Taylor Hunter