Anahita KhojandiView profile
Associate Professor
Anahita Khojandi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she also holds the Heath Endowed Faculty Fellow in Business & Engineering title. She is also a Joint Associate Professor at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education and served as the Director of the Reliability and Maintainability Engineering Program from 2021 to 2024. Her interdisciplinary research spans healthcare, transportation, environmental engineering, and advanced manufacturing. Education: PhD in Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh MS in Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh BS in Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran Her research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, reinforcement learning, Markov decision processes, and predictive analytics. These methodologies are applied to critical domains such as sepsis prediction, Parkinson’s disease treatment using wearable sensors, intelligent transportation systems, nuclear safety, and green infrastructure resilience. She integrates machine learning with stochastic modeling to improve real-time decision-making in complex systems. The recent publications highlight a strong trend toward AI-driven solutions in healthcare and infrastructure, with emphasis on explainability, anomaly detection, and real-time adaptation. Her work frequently appears in high-impact journals such as Management Science , IEEE Transactions , and Nuclear Technology , reflecting both methodological rigor and practical relevance. Scientific Awards and Honors: AAAS Rapid Response AI Fellow (2024) NIH AIM-AHEAD Fellowship in Leadership (2023) First Place, Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award (INFORMS, 2022) Best Paper Award, OMEGA Journal (2020, 2021) INFORMS Senior Member (2024) Teaching Award, IISE DAIS Division (2024) Khojandi has advised numerous graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom are co-authors on her publications. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), and other federal and institutional grants. She actively contributes to professional service, including leadership roles in INFORMS, where she served as Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and currently serves as Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition. She leads research initiatives at the intersection of industrial engineering and data science, often in collaboration with the Health Innovation Technology & Simulation (HITS) Lab and the Center for Transportation Research. Her lab focuses on developing AI-enabled decision support tools for clinical and operational environments, with future work targeting autonomous systems, personalized medicine, and climate-resilient infrastructure.
