The CDC Senior Design team, who placed as finalists in the Fall 2014 Senior Design Competition, can add another accolade to their project – taking home first place in the Technical Paper Competition at the IIE Southeast Regional Conference at Mississippi State University.  

The team consists of ISyE undergraduate students Nishi Anand, Dylan Buczek, Nicholas Buczek, Timothy Lin, Tanay Rajore, and Muriel Wacker, and their advisor Professor Pinar Keskinocak, who is the William W. George Chair and Professor at ISyE.

Their paper discusses two decision-support tools they developed to help reduce transplant transmission of infectious encephalitis organs. The tools developed include

1. An infectious encephalitis risk calculator for physicians to estimate the probability that a donor has infectious encephalitis.
2. A liver transplant decision aid for transplant doctors and patients to evaluate the trade-offs between accepting or rejecting an increased-risk encephalitis liver.

As first place winners in the regional competition, their paper now goes to the Undergraduate Technical Paper Competition Global Finals with winners announced at the IIE Annual Conference & Expo in Nashville in May 2015.