I am a professor of Industrial Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst. I joined UMass in the Fall of 2008. I received my PhD in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University in August 2006. My dissertation work was on scheduling problems broadly motivated by the wafer fabrication stage of semiconductor manufacturing.
From Aug 2006-2008, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Health Sciences Research at the Mayo Clinic, an academic medical institution in Rochester, Minnesota. I found the position by chance; it was one of those unplanned events that changed my research focus completely, although the scheduling algorithms and methodologies I had learned as a graduate student still turned out to be useful in healthcare. My primary research themes now revolve around operations research applied to healthcare delivery. Some examples include:
(1) Improving the ability of patients to see their primary care physicians on time.
(2) Determining whether a certain intervention/treatment for medically complex patients had an impact, and quantifying the effort needed of clinical staff to assist the patients.
(3) Finding patterns of care utilization among patients with multiple chronic conditions.
(4) Modeling patient flow and optimal staffing/scheduling in outpatient, inpatient, and emergency care environments.
In addressing these problems, I’ve had the good fortune of working with many healthcare institutions/practices: 1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; 2. Baystate Health, Springfield, Massachusetts (western campus of Tufts Medicine) 3. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA; 4. The Atkinson Family Practice, Amherst MA; 6. Holyoke Health Center, Holyoke, MA; 7. Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, Camden, New Jersey. This type of collaborative healthcare engineering work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
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Teaching
I have taught courses for undergraduates, masters, and PhD students. Much of what I research eventually makes it to the classroom in one form or another, and — I found this quite surprising — teaching often led me to new research ideas simply by forcing me to reflect on the fundamentals of mathematics. Here’s a list of the courses I’ve taught:
(1) Introduction to Probability and Statistics (MIE 273/ CEE 260)
(2) Introduction to Simulation (MIE 373)
(3) Introduction to Markov Models (MIE 380)
(4) Operations Research in Healthcare (MIE 565)
(5) Linear Programming (MIE 620) — 2008-2018, 2023
(6) Stochastic Processes in Industrial Engineering (MIE 684)
(7) Analytics and Statistical Learning (MIE 597 AS)
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Other Interests
If you’d like to know my interests outside of academia — and I have a lot of such interests, often exerting a pull much stronger than academic research — feel free to read my essays for the science and humanities website 3 Quarks Daily and my blog which I am attempting to revive.
Contact: hbalasub at umass dot edu