Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Integrative Studies and Urban Fellow in the Urban Institute at Singapore Management University (SMU). Prior to joining SMU, I was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney. I received my PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the National University of Singapore, and two bachelor’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and in Computer Science (dual degree) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I am seeking highly self-motivated PhD students and visiting students with strong backgrounds in mathematics and/or programming. If you’re interested, please feel free to reach out with your CV and academic transcript.

Research Interests

My research interests broadly span operations research/management and data science, with a focus on the following areas:

• Data analytics: data-driven decision-making methodologies
• Operations management: healthcare analytics, smart city operations, reliability & anomaly detection
• Applied data science: recurrent event data, lifetime data, time-series data

Selected Awards

• Research
  • Lee Kong Chian Fellowship (2026)
  • 2026 Pierskalla Award Finalists; sponsored by the INFORMS Health Applications Society that honors the best paper advancing health services delivery through operations research.
  • Best Paper Award of the 12th Asia-Pacific International Conference on Advanced Reliability and Maintenance Modeling.
  • Finalist in the Best Paper Competition at the 2025 INFORMS Conference on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability.
  • Best Paper Award of the 2025 International Conference on Reliability, Maintainability and Safety.
  • First place in the Best Paper Competition at the 2023 INFORMS Conference on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability.
  • First place in the Best Student Paper Competition of the 2023 INFORMS Society on Location Analysis (to the student coauthor Weiliang Liu).
  • Featured Article at the ISE Magazine, 2020.
  • Excellent paper award of the Operations Research Society of China Reliability Chapter 2019 Annual Meeting.
• Data Challenges
  • Finalist in the 2025 INFORMS Data Mining Society Data Challenge.
  • Finalist in the Industrial Data Challenge at the 2025 INFORMS Conference on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability.
  • Runner-up of the 2024 IISE Data Analytics & Information Systems Case Study Competition.
  • Finalist of the 2024 INFORMS Data Mining Society Data Challenge.
  • Third place in the GeoLifeCLEF 2024 competition at the 11th CVPR-FGVC Workshop.
  • First place and a finalist (for two different solutions) of the 2023 INFORMS Blue Summit Supplies Data Mining Challenge.
  • First place in the 2022 INFORMS Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Industry Data Challenge Competition.