Daniel
Business Analytics & Operations
2022
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Why did you choose to do a PhD?
I hope to make my own contribution to the world by expanding new knowledge and educating the younger generation, which is both my interests. Therefore, I hope to do a PhD and pursue a career path in academics.
Why did you choose to do graduate education at NUS? If you received offers from other universities, why did you pick NUS?
NUS has a world-class research environment. The faculty members are conducting high-quality research consistently. There are also frequent research activities here, such as the regular seminars which are usually given by the top scholars in our field.
How does graduate school compare to your undergraduate experience?
In graduate school, we are mainly doing research, which is more open compared with the coursework in undergraduate study. By doing research, we aim to answer questions for which the solutions have not existed, and we do not even know whether there would be a solution. By contrast, in undergraduate studies, we usually know that the questions we are handling are well defined, and given sufficient time, we should be able to solve those questions. Therefore, the study in graduate school is much more challenging and also brings more satisfaction once we get problems solved.
Briefly share about your research or thesis (i.e. dissertation topic for Masters by Coursework students).
Uncertainties are ubiquitous in the decision-making process. My thesis mainly provides a more practical framework for considering the risk in decision-making problems under uncertainty. It is more practical as the computational complexity is maintained at a moderate level, and model parameters can be easily calibrated. In the thesis, we also provide theoretical support for the framework.
What impact do you hope to have with your research?
To provide a more effective and efficient decision-making tool for a wide range of operations problems, including supply chain management, healthcare operations, project management, smart city, etc.
Academic Activities
With my collaborators, I was thrilled to receive two prizes recently. The first one is the Finalist in the MSOM Best OM paper in OR 2021. OR is a flagship journal in our field, and members of our community submit their best papers to OR. Therefore, this recognition indicates that our paper is among the best in our area. The second one is the Best Paper Award at the 2022 CSAMSE Conference, a major conference in our field in the summer. For us, the common way to achieve these two awards is that our team is patient and keeps focusing on the very challenging and fundamental problems, even if it takes a long time and a considerable effort to see the rewards.