Ching-Hua Chen           

Since 2015, I have been leading an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, data scientists and medical researchers, whose goal is to develop and test technology-enabled approaches to studying health behavior and patient decision-making. We want to use technology to increase the speed, breadth and accuracy with which practitioners can identify interventions for health behavior modification. We also want to improve our ability to quantify health behavior and patient experience through the analysis of various types of temporal data (e.g., from medical/health records, social platforms, wearable devices, IoT sensors).

Previously, I was a user experience researcher in IBM Watson Group, during which time I had the pleasure of improving the useability of our cognitive computing products and services. In 2012 and 2013, I was the Research Director of the IBM Research Collaboratory in Singapore, where we collaborated with the Singapore government to create mathematical models for forecasting and decision-support for traffic and environmental management. Prior to this, I was a Research Staff Member in the business analytics and mathematical sciences department at IBM Resarch, where I developed optimization, simulation and statistical inference solutions for applications in semiconductor manufacturing, health care services and salesforce management.

I graduated from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, with a dual-title Ph.D. in business administration and operations research. My expertise is in combining various forms of "analytics" (e.g., predictive modeling, statistical forecasting, optimization, simulation) and applying them to applications in business (e.g., supply chain management, health care management, traffic management). I have a Bachelors Degree in Nursing from the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

My dissertation focused on the application of stochastic optimization methods for managing the supply chain for configure-to-order products. This work received honorable mention for the 2006 INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Prize, which is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. Some of my earlier research was centered on behavioral economics, as applied to multi-attribute auctions.