July 2022

• Dr. Dong has received funding from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) again for a planning grant focusing on focusing on “Big Data Analytics for Digitalized Transportation and Logistics”.

June 2022

• Dr. Dong has received funding from the Illinois Department of Transportation for working on the Development of the Equipment Rental Schedule for Illinois. The PI is her incoming colleague at UH, Dr. Zheyong Bian.
• Dr. Dong and her research group will be moving to the University of Houston starting in Fall 2022. If you are interested in joining the group as a graduate student (master or PhD), or postdoc research associate, feel free to reach out.

April 2022

• Dr. Dong has received $50,000 NSF I-Coprs grant “I-Corps: Social Media Misinformation Interactive Dashboard”.
• Dr. Dong has received $40,000 Department of Energy grant focusing on improving the community disaster resilience in the collaboration with professors from UT Austin. More details can be checked here.

Feb 2022

• The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) has awarded $1,445,000 to Texas State University to develop a new data science credential program offered in partnership with Sam Houston State University. The project is led by Dr. Larry Fulton, professor in the School of Health Administration, and Dr. Sasha Dong is serving as one of the co-PIs.

Jan 2022

• We would like to welcome Detong from New York University to join our group!

December 2021

• Congrats Dr. Sasha Dong on receiving the Best Reviewer Award for Omega!
• Congrats Dr. Sasha Dong and Alex on receiving $3,000 funding from NSF I-Corps Texas State Site for their project “Online Social Media Misinformation Dashboard”
• Congrats Alex on being awarded the prestigious Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for the Year 2021 AGAIN!

November 2021

• Dr. Sasha Dong has become a senior member of IISE!
• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected to join the 2022 NSF Panel Fellow Cohort for CMMI’s Game Changer Academies (CGCA) for Advancing Research Innovation

October 2021

• Dr. Sasha Dong received the Family Care Award from INFORMS WORMS (Women in OR/MS)
• Dr. Sasha Dong was invited to present the work about social media sharing during disaster relief at UT Austin Texas Smart Cities Seminar
• Dr. Sasha Dong chaired the Freight Cluster at the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting
• Dr. Sasha Dong presented at the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting about the lateral transshipment work

September 2021

• Dr. Sasha Dong accepted the invitation to join the (founding) editorial board of Communication Engineering, a selective open access journal from Nature Portfolio.

July 2021

• Krystal has successfully defended her master thesis “Machine Learnign Applications in Emergency Management” and will join Clemson University IE PhD program

August 2021

• Dr. Sasha Dong received the 2021 College Achievement Award for Excellence in Scholarly/Creative Activities
• Krystal and Alex received the School Academic Performance Excellence Award!

July 2021

• Krystal has successfully defended her master thesis “Machine Learnign Applications in Emergency Management” and will join Clemson University IE PhD program

July 2021

• Krystal renewed her PEO International Peace Scholarship (IPS). Congrats!

May 2021

• Dr. Sasha Dong charied the Supply Chain and Logistics Track at the 2021 IISE Annual Conference as the leading track chair! Congrats!
• The work by Daniel and Menna won the third place of Operations Research Division Undergraduate Research Dissemination Award at the 2021 IISE Annual Connference
• Happy the end of Spring 2021 spring semester! We are excited to share that the capstone project led by Leah with Sabre Airline Solutions was awarded Best Project (again! for three consecutive years!) In addition, Alex was awarded the Ingram School of Engineering Senior Design Grammy (Graduate Research Assistant Marvelous Mentor of the Year) by supporting quite a few capstone projects over the past year.                                       

April 2021

• We are excited to welcome Dr. Rui Dai from the University of South Florida to join as a postdoc associate!

Feb 2021

• We received the supplemental funding of $48,545 from NSF for our current CRII award project. Thank you NSF!!
• Check out our new paper in the journal Natural Hazards – “Social media information sharing for natural disaster response“.

Jan 2020

• Welcome Leah to our group as an undergraduate student assistant on the evacuation planning project with Texas Department of Transportation!
• Alex and Lauren will attend the TRB annual meeting to present their research projects for Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship!

Dec 2020

• Congrats Daniel and Menna on receiving the first place of the INFORMS OR/MS mini-poster competition (undergraduate-level), and Jorge on receiving the honorable mention!

Nov 2020

• Congrats Dr. Sasha Dong on receiving the honorable mention for INFORMS Minority Issues Forum (MIF) Early Career Award this year!
• Congrats Alex (graduate) and Lauren (undergraduate) on receiving the prestigious Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for Year 2020! Congrats!

Oct 2020

• The project “D-ISN: TRACK 2: Building a Community to Use Intelligence from Online Underground Markets” has been awarded by National Science Foundation! Dr. Sasha Dong will serve as the supporting senior personnel collaborating with a team of interdisciplinary researchers from Georgia State University.

Sept 2020

• Dr. Sasha Dong will chair the 2021 IISE Annual Conference Logistics and Supply Chain (LSC) Track
• As a Co-PI, Dr. Sasha Dong recently received the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund to advance the work on machine learning (including deep vision), geographical information systems, and complex optimization modeling(e.g., mixed integer nonlinear).
• Congrats Dixizi (Krystal) having received the financial support from INFORMS Minority Issues Forum (MIF) to attend the virtual 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting!

July 2020

• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected as a Fellow for the NSF Operations and Systems Engineering Extreme Event Research (OSEEER) Early Career Mentoring (ECM) Program
• Congrats Dixizi (Krystal) being selected for the Texas State Student Government Scholarship Award this year! Good Job!
• Our research group will (virtually) attend the 2020 Research Meeting organized by Natural Hazards Center with the theme of “The Data Revolution” to present our work about using meachine learning techniques to mine the public opinions on Twitter about disaster response.

June 2020

• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected as the editorial board member of Sustainable Futures, and young editorial board member of Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering
• Congrats Lingyu on winning the 1st Place of IISE logistics and Supply Chain (LSC) Division Best Student Paper Award. The paper is entitled “Ride Sharing Models of Disaster Response”
• We welcome Alex Little from Texas State, Menna Hassan from Purdue, Daniel Jacobson from Virginia Tech, and Joey Munar from Rice University to join our group this summer for undergraduate research!

April 2020

• Congrats Dixizi (Krystal) on receiving P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship! The International Peace Scholarship Fund, established in 1949, is a program which provides scholarships for selected women from other countries for graduate study in the United States and Canada. Members of P.E.O. believe that education is fundamental to world peace and understanding.
• Congrats Lingyu on receiving Texas State University Outstanding Graduate Student Award this year!!!

March 2020

• Dr. Sasha Dong received NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award. This prestigious award is also known as mini-CAREER: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1948159&HistoricalAwards=false. This is NSF-funded project will develop a machine learning-based computational framework for large-scale stochastic programming problems.
• Gabriel’s second paper coming out at the journal Computers and Industrial Engineering, which studies supplier selection decision making in disaster response. Here is the free access!
• Dixizi (Krystal) presented her research poster “Exploring the Contagion Effect of Social Media on Mass Shootings” at Texas State University 2020 Women in Science and Engineering Conference (WiSE) Conference.
  

Feb 2020

• Dr. Sasha Dong is now organizing a special issue of the journal Natural Hazards (https://lnkd.in/eZFZV8F) – “Big Data Analysis and Management: Climate Economics, Meteorological Hazards and Environmental Risk” as a guest editor. The detailed call for papers is here. Please feel free to share it with anyone that you think might have interests in. We are looking forward to reviewing your papers!
• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected by Harvard Business School as one of the 30 leading junior researchers in the field of Data Science regarding Management and Decision Sciences, and she has been invited to attend the workshop in April in Harvard University to present her research work about big data in disaster operations managment.

Jan 2020

• Dr. Guo Qiu, from Beijing Jiaotong University, will join our lab as a postdoc associate. Welcome her!!
• Dr. Shaolong Hu finished his postdoctoral work and will join the School of Economics and Management at Southwest Jiaotong University as an assistant professor. Congratulations!
• Our invited paper “Optimal Fulfillment Strategies on Omnichannel Grocery Supply Chains” has been accepted by 2020 POMS Annual Conferene. That is a collobrative work with the University of Michigan and University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Dec 2019

• Lingyu’s research presentation “Twitter Data Sentitement Analysis of Disaster Response” has been accepted by the Data Analytics and Information Systems Track of 2020 IISE Annual Conference.

Nov 2019

• Sasha was invited as the plenary speaker by the first symposium on Disaster Risk Analysis and Big Data 2019 in Pembroke, NC to discuss her recent research in the pre-positioning of disaster relief supplies and supplier selection strategy.                                                                   

Oct 2019

• Shaolong presented our Transportation Research Part B work “A multi-stage stochastic programming model for relief distribution considering the state of road network” at INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.
• Sasha was invited by the Association of Chairs of OR Departments during the INFORMS Annual Meeting to introduce WORMS (Women in OR/MS) and its events.                                                      

Aug 2019

• Lingyu presented his research work about travel frequency patterns of public bike systems and bike sharing systems at the 25th International Conference on Production Research in Chicago!                   
• Congrats on Gabriel! He just passed his thesis defense. Through his two-year study, he has made several impressive achievements, including Modeling & Simulation Best Student Paper, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (May 2019), Graduate College Scholarship, Texas State University (April 2019), Local Collegiate Competition (2nd runner-up), Society of Women in Engineering (March 2019), Ingram School of Engineering Director’s List, Texas State University (August 2018), and Student Government Scholarship, Texas State University (August 2018).                                  

June 2019

• We received fund from Texas Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration to run National Summer Transportation Institute at Texas State University. Check out our curriculum and sign up if you are interested! https://www.engineering.txstate.edu/Programs/CE/TXDOT-Summer-Camp.html

May 2019

• Congrats to Gabriel! His paper “Multi-stage Stochastic Programming for Prepositioning Relief Supplies Considering Expiration Dates” has been awarded by IISE Modeling and Simulation Division as the best student paper this year, and it is part of his master thesis.                                                
• Lingyu and Lauren presented the research regarding fresh e-Commerce in IEEE ICNSC 2019.

• Our project “On-Time Prediction Modeling Using Machine Learning” with Sabre Airline Solutions has been awarded People’s Choice Award among all the IE capstone projects in today’s Engineering Senior Design Day. Thank you for all the students’ hardworking and Sabre’s sponsorship.

• Dr. Sasha Dong visited George Mason University to give an invited talk at the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research regarding her research in disaster relief.
• Dr. Sasha Dong presented her research work about dynamic supplier selection in disaster response at POMS 2019 in Washington D.C.
• Congrats on Lingyu’s achievement – he received Student Government Scholarship for year 2019-2020.

April 2019

• Lauren attended the undergraduate research conference to present our work on Fresh e-Commerce.

  

• Our work about bike sharing programs has been featured by Texas State University News Room. Read our story!
• We have two papers accepted by IISE Annual Conference this year: 1) Multi-stage Stochastic Programming for Pre-positioning Relief Supplies Considering Expiration Dates; and 2) A Sample Average Approximation for Facility Location Considering Uncertain Demand. See you in Orlando!

March 2019

• Shaolong’s paper “A multi-stage stochastic programming model for relief distribution considering the state of road network” has been accepted by Transportation Research Part B: Methodological!!!
• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected as the board director member for IISE Logistics and Supply Chain (LSC) Division, which is the second largest division in the IISE family. Congrats!
• Gabriel has won the 3rd place of Collegiate Competition at WE Local St. Louis Conference for part of his thesis research (https://welocal.swe.org/st-louis/location/). The presentation is entitled “A Multistage Stochastic Programming Approach for Prepositioning of Relief Supplies”. Congrats!
  

Feb 2019

• Our paper “Strategic Development of Fresh E-Commerce With Respect to New Retail” has been accepted by IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control. This work has been done majorly by Lingyu and Lauren.

Dec 2018

• Sasha was awarded the Texas State University Research Enhancement Program Award for research “Stochastic optimization for supplier selection and pre-positioning relief supplies”. The funding rate is only 25.2% this year!
• Gabriel just passed his thesis proposal defense! Congrats!
• Shaolong and Sasha’s paper “Supplier selection and pre-positioning strategy in humanitarian relief” is now available on Omega!

Nov 2018

• Dr. Sasha Dong was invited to give a talk “A multi-stage stochastic programming model for relief distribution considering road network disruption” at ORIE seminar of UT Austin.
• Dr. Sasha Dong has organized two sessions at INFORMS annual meeting this year. One is “Disaster and Humanitarian Logistics” under Transportation Science and Logistics, and the other is “Uncertainty and Network Resilience” under Optimization. You are welcome to attend!

Sept 2018

• Dr. Sasha Dong was invited to give a talk “Supplier Selection and Prepositioning Strategy in Humanitarian Relief” at UT Austin.
• Dr. Sasha Dong has been selected as TX State LBJ Institute Research Faculty Fellow (Year 2018-2020)! This program is supported by National Science Foundation under grant or cooperative agreement award number 1431578.

Aug 2018

• It has been a very productive summer. Before the summer officially ends, there is one more paper “Multi-mode Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Alternative Project Structure” accepted by journal Computers and Industrial Engineering.
• Welcome Mr. Lingyu Meng from Southeast University to join our lab! He is the recipient of the 2018 Graduate College Scholarships (as a new graduate).
• Congratulations to Gabriel for receiving academic performance excellence award!
• Sasha was invited by Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) to work on the industry-university collaboration project with C.H Robinson. This work has been funded by IMA and NSF jointly.
• Sasha’s paper “Optimal pricing and inventory strategies for introducing a new product based on demand substitution effects” has been accepted by Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization!
• Sasha’s best paper award has been highlighted in the IISE Magazine (Aug 2018): https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/t/30000-ise-magazine
• Loraine presented her research during this summer “social media data mining in the transportation field” at Texas State University Undergraduate Research Symposium (both oral and poster). Her work was sponsored by NSF SURE program. Check out her presentation here: https://youtu.be/Zy_hGhi8UAw

June 2018

• Sasha’s new paper “Robust Optimization for Integrated Construction Scheduling and Multi-scale Resource Allocation” has been accepted by Complexity. This work has been done together with co-authors from Nanjing University (China) and Curtin University (Australia).

May 2018

• Sasha was awarded by Texas State University New Faculty Startup Grant!
• Sasha presented her work on resource allocation and project scheduling at the IISE 2018 annual conference in Orlando and received the Engineering Management track best paper! The news can also be found at “Ingram School Spotlight”.

• This summer we welcome four girls (IE undergraduates) to join our lab for the research! They are Paula Cruz Acosta, Loraine Ribon Gutierrez, Melina Mijares, and Lauren Christenson. Their research will be financially supported by NSF SURE program and SRC-URO program.
• This semester Sasha led two senior capstone projects in a collaboration with Sabre Airline Solutions. Both teams presented their projects at the Ingram School of Engineering Senior Design Day. Good job! The project titles are “Developing a reliability measure based optimization model for airline crew vacation allocation problem” and “A reliability–driven model for airline crew vacation grid optimization“. More details can be found here.
  

   

April 2018

• Sasha’s paper about resource project scheduling has been awarded as the IISE Society for Engineering and Management Systems (SEMS) & Engineering Management Track best paper. She will attend the IISE annual conference in Orlando next month to receive this award.
• Sasha’s new paper about improving the transfer feasibility at high-speed train stations has been accepted by Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. This work has been done with co-authors from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

March 2018

• Sasha and Shaolong were invited by Institute of Mathematics and its Application to attend the workshop to discuss about integrating machine learning and predictive simulation
• Sasha received the invitation from Media Planet USA to discuss her views on how transportation can change our futures. The discussion (with other transportation experts in business) can be found here. It has also been published as Ingram School Spotlight –                                       

Feb 2018

• Sasha received a travel grant from Consejos Colectivos (NSF sponsored) and attended this conference to discuss how to improve STEM success at HSIs
• Sasha was invited to join the editorial board of International Journal of Industrial and Operations Research

Jan 2018

• Sasha was selected as Treasurer of INFORMS WORMS (Women in OR/MS)
• Sasha received a startup research grant from Material Handling Institute!
• Dr. Shaolong Hu from Tongji University joined the UTIL Lab as a postdoc associate. Welcome!

Dec 2017

• Sasha gave an invited presentation “Scheduling Resource-Constrained Project Problem with Alternative Activity Chains” at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Jiangsu University, and Yangzhou University.
• Sasha created UTIL (Urban, Transportation, Logistics, Informatics) Lab at Texas State University
• Oluwasegun Gabriel Olanrewaju joined the UTIL Lab as a graduate research assistant. Welcome!
• Zachary Schneiderman joined the UTIL Lab as an undergraduate research assistant. He is sponsored by SRC Education Alliance. Welcome!

Oct 2017

• Sasha organized a session “Designing Logistics Network” at 2017 INFORMS annual meeting in Houston, TX
• Sasha gave an invited presentation “Resilient Route Design for Collection of Material from Suppliers” at 2017 INFORMS annual meeting in Houston, TX
• Sasha was selected as a participant of 2017 INFORMS New Faculty Colloquium
• Dr. Dong received INFORMS Family Care Award

July 2017

• Sasha left FedEx Freight and joined Texas State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering
• Sasha was invited to attend the workshop co-organized by NSF and IMA (Institute for Mathematics and its Applications) focusing on tracking collaboratively emerging problems in industry