Ph.D. Student - Operations Research
About
Abel is a Ph.D. student in Operations Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Dr. Lauren Steimle. He completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Computational Biology at Harvey Mudd College. He is currently an NDSEG fellow through the Office of Naval Research and Seth Bonder Scholar. Previously, he was the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. His research lies at the intersection of operations research, health, and public policy. His goal is to parlay advances in operations research into easily understood policies and models that improve population health, especially with regard to non-communicable diseases in resource constrained settings. Post graduation, Abel plans to pursue an academic career.
Research
Abel’s research focuses on applying operations research techniques, such as mixed integer programming and simulation optimization, to improve the delivery of non-communicable disease (NCD) care under resource constraints. NCDs such as diabetes and cancer contribute to a large majority of global morbidity and mortality. While limited resources have long challenged NCD care in developing countries, issues which bear structural similarity—such as high treatment costs and labor shortages—increasingly impact NCD treatment in the developed world as well.
Operations research can help ensure that decisions drive monetary, staffing, and technology allocation decisions are made in a way that improves equity and population-level health outcomes. Abel’s early graduate research produced policies to improve access to tertiary care in Rwanda and identified that provider scarcity likely limits the number of facilities which can provide cancer care. Current applied work focuses on designing diagnosis and treatment networks in Rwanda which improve geographic accessibility in the face of uncertain disease burden, adverse weather events, and provider scarcity.
Concurrently, Abel is working on models that capture provider scarcity in two developed settings. He is developing new integer optimization techniques that can take advantage of structural features in healthcare delivery systems and infrastructure networks to support decisions at state and national scale. In future work , Abel wants to continue to develop context-specific models that are representative, tractable and move NCD health systems towards better efficacy on domestic and global scales.