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Every minute matters when someone has a stroke, and a new study from the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MSE) is helping identify what’s standing in the way of faster, life-saving care. The study was conducted by researchers in the department’s Waterloo Analytics and Optimization Lab (WANOPT), including Rahenda Khoeir, a doctoral researcher, and Dr. Fatma Gzara, an MSE professor and co-director of WANOPT. Partnering with the Waterloo Regional Health Network (WHRN), the team analyzed 218 acute stroke cases in Waterloo Region over three years, examining door-to-needle time – the gap between a patient’s arrival at hospital and treatment with clot-busting medication.

"This project allowed us to look at stroke care from multiple perspectives," says Gzara. Drawing on both historical patient records and direct feedback from frontline staff, she and her team were able to see how stroke care actually unfolds day to day, not just on paper. Khodeir points to the principle driving the urgency: "time is brain" — every minute that passes without treatment costs the patient more brain tissue. Go to Researchers identify barriers to faster stroke treatment for the full story on the findings and what’s next for the research.

Management Engineering sits at the intersection of engineering rigor, systems thinking, operations research, and organizational design; the exact foundation of one of the most in-demand careers in technology: Technical Program Management. A TPM owns the delivery of complex, cross-functional programs end to end, requiring technical credibility and organizational range in equal measure. That is Management Engineering’s graduate profile, almost word for word. What makes graduates of the program genuinely irreplaceable is malleability, trained to see the structure of systems rather than the surface of any one industry, they can enter any domain and lead.

Research by Scholar Sun, a Health AI and Analytics Lab research assistant, was featured in the May 2026 issue of ISE Magazine. The paper, published in IISE Transactions on Healthcare Engineering, develops methods to ensure that optimized radiation therapy treatment plans can be translated into clinically deliverable solutions. The work was supervised by Prof. Houra Mahmoudzadeh and conducted in collaboration with the Waterloo Regional Health Network (WRHN) Cancer Centre.