Sara Shashaani

Sara Shashaani is an Assistant Professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University (NC State), part of the College of Engineering. She holds affiliate roles as Bowman Faculty Scholar, Goodnight Early Career Innovator, and affiliated faculty at the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Logistics (CAMAL). Her work focuses on integrating stochastic optimization and Monte Carlo methods with data science to address societal challenges like energy resilience and healthcare analytics.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering, Purdue University (2016)
• MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering & Operations Research, Virginia Tech (2014)
• MS in Industrial Engineering, Purdue University (2011)
• Bachelor degrees in Applied Computing (Southern Cross University, 2009) and Industrial Engineering (Iran University of Science and Technology, 2008)

Research Interests: Her work spans stochastic optimization, Monte Carlo simulation, and data-driven decision making, with applications to energy systems, healthcare, and manufacturing. Recent projects include calibrating digital twins for industrial systems, predicting healthcare outcomes using robust feature selection, and developing efficient stochastic optimization algorithms.

Grants & Awards:

• 2024-2028 NSF Grant: Collaborative Research on Stochastic Simulation Optimization
• 2024 Goodnight Early Career Innovator Award
• 2023 IISE Teaching Award
• AAUW Research Publication Grant (2022)

Advisees & Service: Supervises PhD students in simulation optimization and data science. Serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Simulation and organized workshops at Winter Simulation Conference. Notable contributions include the SimOpt open-source testbed for simulation optimization.

Labs & Teams: Leads the Shashaani Research Group, collaborating with NC State’s CAMAL and Department of Statistics. Active in interdisciplinary initiatives like energy resilience and quantum computing applications.