About Me

Hello! I’m Suyanpeng Zhang, and I currently serve as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, working under Professor Sanjay Mehrotra. Before this appointment, I earned my Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2024, advised by Professor Sze-Chuan Suen. I also hold an M.S. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan (2019) and a B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2017).

My research interests include healthcare analytics, dynamic programming, and optimization methods. I am also interested in interdisciplinary areas that combine optimization, statistics, probability, and artificial intelligence. Some of the topics that I have been working on recently:

  • Markov decision processes with applications in healthcare
  • Approximate stochastic gradient descent algorithm and its applications
  • Mixed-integer linear programming models in resource allocation

    • I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market!

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    Recent News:

  • [May 2025] My paper "Quantifying the benefits of increasing decision-making frequency for health applications with regular decision epochs" has been selected as a featured research in ISE Magazine. (Link).
  • [March 2025] My paper "Strategic Influence of Household Attitudes on HPV Vaccination in Kenya: A Network-Based Optimization Approach" with Sze-chuan Suen and Corrina Moucheraud is now under major revision at Service Science (SSRN Link).
  • [Nov 2024] My paper "State discretization for continuous-state MDPs in infectious disease control" with Sze-chuan Suen is now published at IISE Transactions on Health Systems Engineering (Link).
  • [Aug 2024] My paper "Optimizing Vaccine Site Locations While Considering Travel Inconvenience and Public Health Outcomes" with Sze-chuan Suen, Han Yu, Maged Dessouky, and Fernando Ordonez is now under major revision at Health Care Management Science (arxiv Link).
  • [Feb 2024] My paper "Quantifying the benefits of increasing decision-making frequency for health applications with regular decision epochs" with Sze-chuan Suen, Vinay Sundaram, and Cynthia L Gong is now published at IISE Transactions (Link).