Even if you are not a medical doctor, you can still contribute to research and improvements in the medical domain.
This is the approach Sarah Gao Yini, an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, is taking as she redirects her expertise in optimization modelling, which she has used to study supply-chain management issues, and pivots her research focus towards the medical and public health field.
One of the motivations for Assistant Professor Gao, who has a PhD in Decision Sciences from the National University of Singapore, to make this recent switch is the fact that she is the mother of a 6-year-old daughter, who had a health scare when she was just an infant.
“I am a doctor [of philosophy], but not a medical doctor,” said Assistant Professor Gao, 32. “When my daughter was one month old, she got really sick. She is fine now, but it made me realise that my research up to that point did not really help her or help other people in the healthcare domain.”
She became interested in solving business challenges with optimisation models after she worked briefly in the private sector as a fresh graduate, dealing in procurement.
After consulting one of her former undergraduate professors, who suggested that she pursue her PhD, she went on to do her thesis on the topic of “distributionally robust optimisation”, which she called a “very mathematically driven” topic.
“When we do optimisation, we assume that certain parameters are known,” she said. “But in practice, there may be parameters we cannot actually identify at that point. We may know the objective and have some rough ideas, but we are not sure.”
“Under such uncertainty, to make a good decision, we can use a framework with some distribution and some probability, and optimise the decision to hedge against the worst-case scenario.”
For example, when an unexpected event such as the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic arises, such frameworks can help to mitigate risk prior to supply chain disruptions by accounting for emergency supply, and by also catering for possible surges in demand post-disruption.
One of Assistant Professor Gao’s most notable papers, “Disruption Risk Mitigation in Supply Chains – The Risk Exposure Index Revisited”, was published in 2019 in the Operations Research journal.
While she has used her research to look at optimization techniques and frameworks that can be applied to supply-chain risk mitigation, to ridesharing operations, to humanitarian operations and also to homeland security issues, Assistant Professor Gao is now finding ways to lend her knowledge to the healthcare sector.
“So I shifted my angle from helping businesses, or big companies, to helping society or the community. The math that I have learned for optimisation, it can still make a difference in terms of helping people,” she said.
“Even if I don’t know clinical details, I can help operations-wise, for example, such as with appointment systems or allocating resources like the intensive care unit.”
Some of her current research includes studying how to increase participation in a cancer screening programme and looking at how to better optimise Covid-19 inoculation, factoring in vaccine supply and demand, as well as the recommended intervals between the two required doses.
Assistant Professor Gao, who credits a colleague for often discussing his own research experience in healthcare with her, and thus inspiring her in this line of research, received a Ministry of Education Tier 1 Fund grant for the project called “On the Design of Customized Colorectal Cancer Screening Policies to Improve Screening Guideline Compliance” in 2018.
In this project, the researchers conducted a nationwide survey with respondents aged about 50 to 70, the recommended age for colorectal cancer screening in Singapore, with the hope of uncovering insights to help the National Colorectal Cancer Screening Programme.
“My motivation is really to know why some Singaporeans are reluctant to take part,” she said. “There could be many reasons, ranging from fear of getting bad news, to concerns over their age and the potential treatment costs. We can then learn how to modify the policy guidelines so that more people will be willing to take up the screening.”
While still engaged in research for both the cancer screening policy and Covid-19 vaccine delivery optimisation, Assistant Professor Gao is hopeful she can proceed to complete the resultant papers quickly and share the findings as soon as possible.
In particular, the vaccine delivery findings could be beneficial not only to Singapore, but to other countries as well, she noted. Hence, the researchers are also building an online interface to publish their optimization techniques, including an online tool that can recommend a suitable rollout policy.
Assistant Professor Gao, who has been at LKCSB since 2017, teaches two courses – Supply Chain Management and Service and Operation Analytics – to undergraduate students. She teaches a course in Linear Optimisation to PhD candidates.
She characterises her teaching style as “quite strict”. “I push my own students hard and I have very frequent meetings with them. I want to keep them focused on their work and be straightforward in pointing out their areas for improvement.”
