Dr. Houra Mahmoudzadeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at the University of Waterloo and is affiliated with the Waterloo Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Industrial Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology. Before joining academia, Dr. Mahmoudzadeh worked as the Director of the Industrial Engineering Department at a pharmaceutical manufacturing company.
Dr. Mahmoudzadeh's research mainly focuses on the methodology and applications of large-scale robust optimization and data-driven inverse optimization, with a special interest in healthcare. She has active research collaborations with several health organizations including the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Grand River Regional Cancer Centre, Grand River Hospital, and Cambridge Memorial Hospital. Her work has been published in top journals in the fields of Operations Research and Medical Physics and has been funded through multiple NSERC grants and other internal/external funding. Dr. Mahmoudzadeh is a Senior Member of INFORMS and has been serving the OR/MS community in multiple roles in INFORMS, the CORS Council, and the CORS Healthcare Operational Research SIG . She is also the recipient of the 2024 Engineering Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Waterloo.
