Hari Jagannathan Balasubramanian

CV; Publications; Google Profile

Blog (humanities-focused)

(Updated: Feb, 2012)

I am an assistant professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst. I joined UMass in the Fall of 2008. I obtained my PhD from the Industrial Engineering department at Arizona State University in August 2006. From Aug 2006-August 2008, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Health Sciences Research at the Mayo Clinic, a large academic medical institution in Rochester, Minnesota.

My primary research interests are broadly in operations research applied to healthcare delivery. Some examples: I've worked on planning and scheduling of surgical suites; designing primary care physician panels to maximize timeliness and patient-physician continuity; and optimization of prostate cancer screening decisions. I have also recently begun looking at improving emergency room operations and capacity planning in hospitals.

In addressing these problems, I collaborate with a diverse set of healthcare institutions: 1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; 2. Baystate Health, Springfield, Massachusetts (western campus of Tufts Medicine) 3. University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts 4. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA; 5. The Atkinson Family Practice, Amherst MA. Our patient flow work with the Atkinson Family Practice was recently featured on their website.

My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (Service Enterprise Systems program), the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, Department of Health and Human Services), and Life Sciences Moment Fund (LSMF) of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

My other interests include scheduling theory, computational complexity, and the design of heuristics. My research as a graduate student was motivated by the complex scheduling problems that are to be found in the wafer fabrication stage of semiconductor manufacturing.

I teach three classes: Linear Programming (MIE 620); Operations Research in Healthcare (MIE 597C), an elective for both graduate and undergraduate students; and Probability and Statistics for Engineers at the sophomore level. In the past I have taught Introduction to Health Systems Engineering (CTSC5920), along with Brian Denton, at the Mayo Graduate School.

If you'd like to know my interests outside of academia, feel free to peruse my humanities focused blog, Thirty Letters in My Name, where I write personal essays on history, literature, travel and science.

Contact: hbalasubraman at ecs dot umass dot edu