SERC Symposium: Speaker Bio and Abstract

Dimitris Bertsimas, Associate Dean for Business Analytics & Professor of Operations Research, MIT Sloan

Nikos Trichakis, Associate Professor of Operations Management, MIT Sloan

Abstract

Reshaping Organ Transplant Allocation in the U.S.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is coordinating all transplantation activities in the U.S., allocating donated organs to tens of thousands of patients on the national waitlist on a 24/7 basis. UNOS is currently undergoing a major overhaul of its organ allocation system that has been in place for over thirty years. In close partnership with UNOS, we applied analytics to optimize various facets of the new system, striving to make it more efficient, more equitable, and more inclusive for different racial, age, and gender groups, among others. Beginning from Spring of this year, all deceased-donor lungs will be allocated in the U.S. based on a policy that we helped design, while our team is currently heavily involved in reshaping allocation policies for all other organs, including kidneys and livers.   

Bio

Dimitris Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research and the Associate Dean of Business Analytics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, an INFORMS fellow, recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, the Erlang Prize, finalist of the Franz Edelman Prize four times, and the INFORMS President’s Award, among many other research and teaching awards, supervisor of 88 completed and 25 current doctoral theses, editor of the INFORMS Journal on Optimization and co-founder of ten analytics companies and two foundations. 

Nikolaos (Nikos) Trichakis is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests include optimization under uncertainty, data-driven optimization and analytics, with application in healthcare, supply chain management, and finance. Trichakis is particularly interested in the interplay of fairness and efficiency in resource allocation problems and operations, and the inherent tradeoffs that arise in balancing these objectives.