Vala Rahmati
Ph.D. candidate, Operations Research and Engineering Management
Research Interests: Vala's research focuses on applying operations research to disaster management, developing methods that improve how relief supplies and evacuation efforts are planned and coordinated under uncertainty. He designs time-expanded network models to represent how disasters unfold over time, helping decision-makers plan more effective response strategies. His methodological work centers on decomposition-based optimization techniques, which he uses to make these large-scale, uncertain network problems solvable at practical scale.
Road to the Moody School: Vala earned his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, where he developed a strong foundation in data analytics and optimization. He entered his PhD directly from his undergraduate studies, drawn ÎçÒ¹AV's Lyle School of Engineering for the opportunity to work with Prof. Halit Üster on large-scale network optimization. As a research assistant, he has focused on applying operations research to disaster response, work that has grown into a dissertation on network optimization and transportation.