Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) announced that Nicoleta Serban has been appointed to a Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Professorship for a three-year term.

This professorship was endowed by Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello (BSHS 1980) in order to enhance ISyE’s ability to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars to this position of academic leadership in the field of health care delivery operations.

Serban's education and research trajectory makes her unique in the pursuit of data-driven discovery endeavors. Her research record is quite diverse, from mathematical statistics to modeling to data analysis to qualitative insights on causality and complexity, with recent contributions on drawing principled inferences on health care delivery and health policy, and statistical inference for high-dimensional optimization models.

She has also been involved in broad impact research activities; the most noteworthy of which is leadership of the Health Analytics initiative. This is a collaborative effort anchored in partnership with a varied network of clinicians, health care providers, and public health entities.

To date, Serban has published more than 55 journal articles, and a collaborative (with ISyE Professor Emeritus William B. Rouse) book titled Understanding and Managing the Complexity of Healthcare published by MIT Press and single-authored  Healthcare System Access: Measurement, Inference, and Intervention published by Wiley. She is the editor for physical sciences, engineering, and the environment for the Annals of Applied Statistics. She has reviewed for multiple funding agencies and she has served in multiple workshops and meetings organized by the National Academies.

Serban received the David Byar Young Investigator Award from the American Statistical Society Biometrics Section in 2004 and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2010. She was given the 2014 INFORMS Best Paper in the Public Sector Award. In 2018, Serban was selected by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program.

Serban received her B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in theoretical statistics and stochastic processes from the University of Bucharest. She earned her Ph.D. in statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

She was previously appointed to the ISyE Coca-Cola Associate Professorship in 2014.