Assistant Professor of Computer Science will use funding to pursue research in facility location optimization

Dr. Jingru , an assistant professor in the Department of , has received a five-year, $495,537 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (). The CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. The research thrust of her award is the optimization of facility locations to determine the best locations of facilities to serve demands under specific optimization criteria.

Specifically, Dr. Zhang will study a set of facility location optimization problems in face of uncertain demand data, and the goal is to explore new ideas and techniques to develop efficient algorithms to solve these optimization problems when provided with uncertain data. The research will incorporate a variety of methodologies from diverse areas such as discrete math, graph theory, combinatorial optimization, probability theory, operations research, computational geometry, and data structures.

Dr. Zhang joined Ï㽶¸£ÀûÖ±²¥ from the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where she was a tenure-track assistant professor. She also taught at Marshall University, and received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Utah State University under the guidance of Dr. Haitao Wang. Through the CAREER award, she will will engage undergraduate and masters students in the development and implementation of algorithms to increase the throughput of them who pursue careers in theoretical computer science research, including continuing on to Ph.D. programs.