Dionne Aleman
Dionne Aleman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, and holds appointments in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (U of T); the Institute for Pandemics (U of T); and the UHN Techna Institute. She is also co-Lead for the Joint Translational Centre for Digital Health, a collaboration between the University of Toronto and the University of Manchester and is a member of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s external experts COVID modeling group. Dr. Aleman received her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida (2007), MSc from the University of Florida (2006), and BSc from the University of Florida (2003).
Dr. Aleman's research focuses on the application of operations research to medical and healthcare systems to improve the quality, timeliness, and efficiency of care. This research includes using optimization, simulation, machine learning, and graph theory to predict and mitigate the spread of pandemic diseases in urban populations, to design and validate radiation therapy treatment plans, to improve hospital surgical scheduling, and to optimize organ transplant matches and multi-person chains. Dr. Aleman has held grants from NSERC, CFI, ORF, and NSF for her research. She is a two-term past President of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS). Within the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), she currently serves on the Committee for Teaching and Learning, and has previously served as Chair of the Health Applications Society (HAS), President of the Public Sector OR Section (PSOR), President of the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG), Chair of INFORM-ED, and TutORials co-chair. Dr. Aleman is also a Topical Editor for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, Associate Editor for IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, Associate Editor for OMEGA, Associate Editor for the International Journal of Biomedical Data Mining, and Editorial Board Member of Operations Research in Health Care.
Pandemic Related Publications
D.M. Aleman, B.Z. Tham, S.J. Wagner, J. Semelhago, A. Mohammadi, P. Price, R. Giffen, P. Rahman. How effective was Newfoundland & Labrador's travel ban to prevent the spread of COVID-19? An agent-based analysis. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.05.21251157. 2021.