News

Professor Houra Mahmoudzadeh and graduate student Rana Shirvai participated in the HOpeR Summer School 2025, hosted at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) from August 18–22, 2025. The program brought together researchers, graduate students, and healthcare professionals for training in healthcare operational research, machine learning, and healthcare systems optimization. Prof. Mahmoudzadeh delivered a plenary session titled “Optimizing Cancer Care: From Data to Decisions”, and Rana presented her research on inverse optimization for radiation therapy as part of the "This Is My Research" series. 

Three of our lab's outstanding students earned recognitions at three different student paper competitions during the Canadian Operational Research Society's Annual Conference (CORS 2025) which was held in Edmonton.

Please join us in congratulating:

• Esma Agkun – Honourable Mention in the Health Care Operational Research (HCOR) SIG Student Paper Competition
• Mina Torabi Milani – Runner Up in the Gilbert Laporte Student Paper Award
• Larissa Troper  – Honourable Mention in the CORS student paper competition - Undergraduate Category

A paper co-authored by doctoral student Esma Agkun and Dr. Safa Erenay was selected as a finalist of the College of Healthcare Operations Management (CHOM) Best Paper Competition at the POMS 2025 conference held in Atlanta, GA. This paper was one of four finalists out of 55 paper submissions, and competed against other finalists from Colombia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Miami University. Congratulations to all authors, who received the honourable mention certificate and award. 

Congratulations to our incoming lab member, Sean Rose, for being selected as a recipient of the Vector Scholarship in AI. Sean will be pursuing an MASc in Management Science and Engineering under the supervision of Professor Houra Mahmoudzadeh starting in Fall 2025. 

"ORchestrate", a team of fourth-year design students in the Health AI and Analytics Lab, won the First Prize at the Management Engineering Capstone Design Awards. Congratulations to the hard-working team members on their excellent work. Well done Matthew Chan, Adel Pazoki, Aniq Premji, Sunischit Thapa, Larissa Troper!

Aniq Premji, a member of the FYDP team co-supervised by professors Hossein Abouee Mehrizi and Houra Mahmoudzadeh won first place at the IISE 2025 Congress technical paper competition. Their paper focuses on optimizing the operating room scheduling at the Cambridge Memorial Hospital. 

Professors Houra Mahmoudzadeh and Hossein Abouee Mehrizi were awarded a Graham Seed Fund award for their proposal on optimizing operating room scheduling. Read more on the Faculty of Engineering News: 

Researchers receive Graham Seed Fund Awards