Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and
Assistant Professor
Education
- Ph.D. Industrial and Operations Engineering (2019), University of Michigan
- M.S.E. Industrial and Operations Engineering (2016), University of Michigan
- B.S. Systems Science and Engineering (2014), Washington University in St. Louis
About
Lauren Steimle is the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her expertise is in operations research/industrial engineering with applications to public health and medicine. Her work builds on optimization, simulation, and predictive modeling to design effective, efficient, and equitable strategies to prevent and control diseases and adverse health outcomes at both the population and individual levels. She has on-going work in the areas of infectious disease control, healthcare access, and medical decision making motivated by problems arising in the contexts of COVID-19, poliovirus, maternal healthcare, and chronic disease management.
Dr. Steimle received her Ph.D. and M.S.E in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, and her Bachelor’s degree in Systems Science and Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. She is the recipient of the Best Paper of IISE Transactions Focus Issue on Operations Engineering & Analytics, the INFORMS Service Science Best Cluster Paper Award (Finalist), and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Research
Dr. Steimle's research involves the creation of industrial engineering and operations research (IE/OR) methodologies to answer decision-making problems arising in public health and medicine. Her areas of research include medical decision-making, regionalized systems of healthcare delivery, and infectious disease prevention and control. Her work is motivated by addressing fundamental problems in these areas arising from challenges in maternal health, poliovirus, and chronic disease management, and her previous work was motivated by COVID-19. From a methodological perspective, she leverages data-driven optimization, Markov decision processes, agent-based modeling, simulation, and predictive models.
Representative Publications
- Examining Perinatal Regionalization in Practice: A Network Analysis of Maternal Transport in Georgia. Jingyu Li, Stephanie M. Radke, Lauren N. Steimle. BMC Health Services Research 25, 862 (2025).
- The Implications of Using Maternity Care Deserts to Measure Progress in Access to Obstetric Care: A Mixed-Integer Optimization Analysis. Meghan Meredith, Lauren N. Steimle, Stephanie Radke. BMC Health Services Research 24, 682 (2024).
- Outbreak response strategies to eliminate circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus: A case study of Serotype 2 in Northern Nigeria. Yuming Sun, Pinar Keskinocak, Lauren N. Steimle, Stephanie Kovacs, Steve Wassilak. Vaccine: X 18 (2024): 100476.
- Interpretable Policies and the Price of Interpretability in Hypertension Treatment Planning. Garcia, Gian-Gabriel P., Lauren N. Steimle, Wesley J. Marrero, and Jeremy B. Sussman. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 26, no. 1 (2024): 80-94.
- Multi-criteria Course Mode Selection and Classroom Assignment Under Sudden Space Scarcity. Mehran Navabi-Shirazi, Mohamed El Tonbari, Natashia Boland, Dima Nazzal, and Lauren N. Steimle. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2022, 24(6):3252-3268.
- Decomposition methods for solving Markov decision processes with multiple models of the parameters. Lauren N. Steimle, Vinayak S. Ahluwalia, Charmee Kamdar, Brian T. Denton. IISE Transactions 53.12 (2021): 1295-1310.
- Multi-model Markov decision processes. Lauren N. Steimle, David L. Kaufman, and Brian T. Denton. IISE Transactions 53.10 (2021): 1124-1139.