Sunday, February 23rd, the HHL Center and ISyE hosted a catered reception and poster session at the Callaway Club in McCamish Pavilion before the Georgia Tech Lady Jacket's basketball team took on Maryland. Georgia Tech Masters and PhD. students shared posters on various projects they have worked on recently, and HHL Center co-director Dr. Julie Swann motivated the Lady Jackets with a locker room speech as a guest coach and was called out onto center court at halftime. 

PhD. student Mallory Soldner shared work on the Georgia Tech HHL Center's collaboration with the United Nations World Food Programme's Logistics Development Unit on a supply chain needs assessment and opportunities to improve efficiency which has turned into a new project to identify Key Performance Indicators and implement a new Supply Chain Management Dashboard (which has taken Soldner to the WFP headquarters in Rome).

Former ISyE student Shelly Ballard shared a poster on the Disaster Response Product Mix tool she designed for Habitat for Humanity International as part of her Master’s thesis. The tool helps to determine the optimal mix of products (such as house construction, disaster training, latrines, hygiene training, etc.) to offer in response to a disaster in order to provide the maximum impact on the affected area and population. For more information on Ballard's tool and the continued collaboration with HFHI on the tool, please see the article published in the GA Tech College of Engineering Magazine (Winter 2014) attached here as a pdf or visit: http://humanitarian.scl.gatech.edu/node/52/274251.

ISyE graduate students Emily Gooding and Colleen Gootee also presented their work with the Task Force for Global Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Ministry of Health in Mozambique on the optimization of workforce allocation of healthcare professionals in Mozambique. The students created a decision support tool (DST) under the guidance of HHL co-directors Pinar Keskinocak and Julie Swann which would aid in the allocation of healthcare workers to provinces using employee preferences as a key factor. The project was envisioned as a step beyond existing methodology for allocation such as the World Health Organization's Workload Indicators of Staffing Needs (2010), which highlights imbalances in given locations but falls short of optimizing allocation or planning.

Other posters included a Post-Disaster Debris Management tool, a Pediatric Catch-Up Vaccine Scheduler tool, a health services study in access entitled "Measuring and Improving for Better Outcomes," and a summary of various HHL Center case studies, games, and other educational materials. For more information on the posters or presenters, please contact meghan.smithgall@isye.gatech.edu.