Episode #103 High Truths on Drugs and Addiction with Dr. Eva Lee and CReDO

Eva Lee, PhD is Professor and Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at Georgia Institute of Technology, a center established through funds from the National Science Foundation and the Whitaker Foundation. The center focuses on biomedicine, public health, and defense, advancing domains from basic science to translational medical research; intelligent, personalized, quality, and cost-effective delivery; and medical preparedness and protection of critical infrastructures. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems, Health System Institute at Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine. She previously served as the Senior Health Systems Engineer and Professor for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She has also served as Co-Director for ten years for the Center for Health Organization Transformation, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center.

Lee's work has included collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on defenses against pandemic and biological weapons, travel to Japan to develop rapid responses to radiation exposure from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the optimization of vaccines and design based on data to how people respond to the vaccines, the early detection of chronic diseases, health disparity, and personalized treatment design for cancer, diabetes and other diseases. Dr. Lee serves as the principal investigator of an online interoperable information exchange and decision support system for mass dispensing, emergency response, and casualty mitigation. The system incorporates disease spread modeling with human behavior and response processes; and offers efficiency and quality assurance in operations and logistics performance. It currently has over 14,000+ public health site users.

Lee partners with business leaders to develop novel transformational strategies in delivery, quality, safety, operations efficiency, information management, change management and organizational learning.  Lee’s research focuses on mathematical programming, information technology, game theory, networks, machine learning and computational algorithms for risk assessment, decision making, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery, and systems and performance optimization.  She has made major contributions in advances to business operations transformation, biomedicine and clinical research, emergency response and disaster preparedness, and healthcare operations and safety.  Her homeland security work has focused on risk assessment and protection of critical infrastructures, including healthcare, supply-chain and logistics, power plants, communication, and finance.

Lee has published over 220 research articles, and 50 government and state reports, and has received patents on innovative medical systems and devices. She is frequently tapped by a variety of health and security policymakers in Washington for her expertise in personalized medicine, chronic diseases, healthcare quality, modeling and decision support, vaccine research and national security/preparedness. She has served on NAE/NAS/IOM, NRC, NBSB, DTRA panel committees related to biological, radiological and chemical incidents, public health and medical preparedness, and healthcare systems innovation.  Lee served on the National Preparedness & Response Science Board from 2015 - 2018, a 13-member federal committee that provides advice and guidance to the President of the United States, and the Secretary of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Lee has received multiple prestigious analytics and practice excellence awards including INFORMS Franz Edelman award, Daniel H Wagner prize, and the Caterpillar and Innovative Applications in Analytics Award for novel cancer therapeutics, bioterrorism emergency response and mass dispensing for casualty mitigation, personalized disease management, machine learning for best practice discovery, transforming clinical workflow and patient care, vaccine immunity prediction, and reducing hospital acquired conditions. Dr. Lee is an INFORMS Fellow. She was also inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, the first IE/OR engineer to be nominated and elected for this honor.

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