PhD position on Stochastic Operations Research in Medical Laboratories

This PhD position offers you the opportunity to join an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the interface of applied mathematics and process optimization in the medical laboratory context. Your contributions will be to gain mathematical insights and ensure that these translate into real-world impact.

Ensuring timely and consistent access to medical test results is crucial for improving the efficiency of healthcare providers. For example, doctors need to know when test results will be available to plan potential follow-up care, which has knock-on effects throughout the healthcare system. However, the variation in the types of tests, the fluctuations in demand for different tests and the complexity of the associated logistical processes make providing such speed and consistency challenging. In this project, we will analyse a variety of real-world inspired problems that need to be overcome to meet this challenge together with Labmicta, a leading medical laboratory in the Twente region in the Netherlands.

As an example, consider the problem of planning the (multi-step) processing of a medical test under uncertainty regarding the demand that will have to be met soon. This requires building robust models to predict future demand, making decisions under time heterogeneous uncertainty and adapting to the state of the processing system online. Our approach will be to draw on a broad selection of tools including (deep) reinforcement learning, queuing networks, online algorithms and systems engineering. In addition, a large component of the project is to ensure that the results translate into impact by ensuring that they are implemented in the real-world in the Labmicta laboratory management systems.

Your project will be embedded in the inter-faculty research team CHOIR (Centre for Healthcare Operations Improvement and Research). CHOIR is a research center within the UT that focuses on Operations Research methods for Healthcare Logistics, such as multi-appointment scheduling, surgery scheduling, and resource allocation in times of scarce healthcare capacity. [CHOIR]{https://www.utwente.nl/en/choir/) is one of the most active and productive research groups in the field of Operations Research and Management in Healthcare.

The position will be in the Applied Mathematics department. The Applied Mathematics department has an active research portfolio in stochastic operations research, algorithmic discrete mathematics, complex networks, statistics, systems theory, computational science, and artificial intelligence with applications in health care, energy systems, traffic, and imaging. Please click the following links to find out more about MOR, SACS and MDS.

Our research group, Stochastic Operations Research (SOR), conducts mathematical education and research of internationally high standards in the areas of stochastic processes and mathematics of operations research to contribute to the development of mathematics in a multidisciplinary engineering environment and contribute to a better understanding and functioning of our increasingly complex society.

The research will be conducted in close collaboration with Labmicta, a leading medical laboratory in the Twente region of the Netherlands.