News Room

China is taking drastic steps to contain the spread of a recently identified coronavirus, but the outbreak has already traveled past its borders, and cities around the globe must be ready to respond to cases within their jurisdictions. Yale SOM’s Edward Kaplan used early reports out of Wuhan to evaluate the likely effectiveness of common tactics, such as isolation of patients and quarantine, in keeping the disease from spreading in new regions. His model predicts that new outbreaks can likely be contained by isolating infected patients, but it also highlights the importance of identifying new cases as early as possible.

Dennis Zhang, assistant professor of operations and manufacturing management at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2020 Olin Award for research that creates a human-focused algorithm to improve warehouse workers’ packing time while also reducing material costs.

President Trump’s administration recently announced new guidelinesrequiring hospitals and insurers to give consumers more information about their health care prices. The administration decreed this transparency mandate as an unprecedented and revolutionary change to the American health care system. However, price transparency alone will not produce any groundbreaking change in our health care system. Policymakers should, in parallel, focus on improving the transparency of the quality of care patients receive. Consumers need to know not only the price of the service they are about to receive, but also the quality of it.

Once the cornerstone for the Rocky Mountain gold rush, this spring, Denver will serve as the setting for an entirely new group of adventurers, those pursuing the latest groundbreaking applications of analytics at the 2020 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference.

From record-setting fires in the western United States to the devastating and still-blazing bushfires in Australia, it is increasingly apparent that society must forge a new relationship with fire.