Transforming Healthcare Decision Science

April 3, 2026

Three conference attendees pose together indoors, with the person in the center holding an INFORMS award certificate and all wearing conference badges.

UW ISE associate professor Shan Liu received the INFORMS Health Applications Society Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award.

INFORMS is the leading international association for professionals working to advance and promote the science and technology of decision making. These professionals range from data science, operations research, analytics, economics, behavioral science, statistics, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, and other relevant fields. The Sanjay and Panna Mehrotra Research Excellence Award recognizes one mid-career researcher every year for their significant contributions to the practice of health applications through operations research and management science modeling and methodologies.

When first selected as a finalist for the award, Liu was invited to give a presentation at the INFORMS conference in October 2025. Her talk, titled “Geospatial healthcare resource allocation problems with fairness considerations,” outlined her work developing decision-analytic modeling to address both individual-level and population-level issues across a range of healthcare applications.

“My research supports clinical and policy decision-making through decision-analytic modeling and optimization techniques. Driven by the urgent needs posed by today's high-impact public health challenges, I tackle critical questions related to screening, monitoring, and treatment of high-burden diseases.”
— Shan Liu

Among the topics covered in her presentation included a project to optimize HIV point-of-care testing systems in Kenya. The team behind this project included ISE associate professor Chaoyue Zhao and graduate student Yinsheng Wang (ISE Ph.D. ‘25), as well as other clinical and health policy collaborators in Kenya.

A presenter stands beside a projected slide titled “Inventory Optimization for Pharmaceutical Fulfillment Networks” during an Amazon Pharmacy research talk at an INFORMS conference.

Wang, now an ISE alumnus, also worked with Liu on a collaborative project with Amazon Pharmacy. This collaboration resulted in an invitation to present their ongoing work at the Amazon Fulfillment Simulation Symposium (AFSS) in September 2025 at Bellevue. Wang has since acquired a full-time position at Oracle.