Sara Shashaani
Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Phone: 919.515.6400
- Email: sshasha2@ncsu.edu
- Office: 4175 Fitts-Woolard Hall
- Website: https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu
Sara Shashaani joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2019. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she worked on designing and improving probabilistic predictive models, specifically used for hurricane-induced power outages, with challenges in highly imbalanced datasets and a large set of explanatory variables. Her dissertation research in the area of derivative-free simulation optimization awarded her a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 2016. Besides her research, she is passionate about activities that target the environment, community wellness, and science communication.
Research Interests
Shashaani’s research interests include stochastic optimization and Monte Carlo simulation methodology, theory and algorithms, their integration with data science and analytics, and their applications in long-term important problems in society such as sustainability and environment resiliency, energy infrastructure systems, healthcare, transportation, and human behavior modeling and economics.
Shashaani’s personal research website
Education
| Degree | Program | School | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial Engineering | Purdue University | 2016 |
| MSISEOR | Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Operations Research | Virginia Tech | 2014 |
| MSIE | Master of Science in Industrial Engineering | Purdue University | 2011 |
| BSIE | Bachelor of Science in Applied Computing | Southern Cross University | 2009 |
| BSIE | Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering | Iran University of Science and Technology | 2008 |
Honors and Awards
- 2021 | Faculty Research and Professional Development Award, North Carolina State University
- 2020 | Finalist in Best Service Science Paper Competition, Service Science Cluster of INFORMS
- 2019 | Outstanding Reviewer Award, Winter Simulation Conference
- 2016 | Best Student Paper Award, Ph.D. Colloquium, Winter Simulation Conference
- 2015 | Ross Fellowship Award, Purdue University
- 2014 | Outstanding Teaching Assistant, ISE Virginia Tech
- 2012 | Visiting Researcher Summer Scholarship, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & Virginia Tech
Discover more about Sara Shashaani
Publications
- Building Trees for Probabilistic Prediction via Scoring Rules
- Shashaani, S., Surer, O., Plumlee, M., & Guikema, S. (2024, May 13), TECHNOMETRICS. https://doi.org/10.1080/00401706.2024.2343062
- CALIBRATING DIGITAL TWINS VIA BAYESIAN OPTIMIZATION WITH A ROOT FINDING STRATEGY
- Jeon, Y., & Shashaani, S. (2024), 2024 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE, WSC, pp. 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC63780.2024.10838781
- COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DISTANCE METRICS FOR DISTRIBUTIONALLY ROBUST OPTIMIZATION IN QUEUING SYSTEMS: WASSERSTEIN VS. KINGMAN
- Eun, H.-K., Shashaani, S., & Barton, R. R. (2024), 2024 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE, WSC, pp. 3368–3379. https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC63780.2024.10838888
- Code and Data Repository for Two-Stage Estimation and Variance Modeling for Latency-Constrained Variational Quantum Algorithms
- Ha, Y., Shashaani, S., & Menickelly, M. (2024), INFORMS Journal on Computing. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2024.0575.cd
- Complexity of Zeroth- and First-order Stochastic Trust-Region Algorithms
- Ha, Y., Shashaani, S., & Pasupathy, R. (2024). , . Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20116
- Data Farming the Parameters of Simulation-Optimization
- Shashaani, S., Eckman, D., & Sanchez, S. (2024), ACM TRANSACTIONS ON MODELING AND COMPUTER SIMULATION, 34(4). https://doi.org/10.1145/3680282
- Iteration complexity and finite-time efficiency of adaptive sampling trust-region methods for stochastic derivative-free optimization
- Ha, Y., & Shashaani, S. (2024, April 3), IISE TRANSACTIONS, Vol. 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/24725854.2024.2335513
- REPEATEDLY SOLVING SIMILAR SIMULATION-OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS: INSIGHTS FROM DATA FARMING
- Felice, N., Shashaani, S., Eckman, D. J., & Sanchez, S. M. (2024), 2024 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE, WSC, pp. 3470–3481. https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC63780.2024.10838951
- ROBUST SCREENING AND PARTITIONING FOR FEATURE SELECTION: A BINARY SIMULATION OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM
- Houser, E., & Shashaani, S. (2024), 2024 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE, WSC, pp. 3229–3240. https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC63780.2024.10838800
- Risk score models for urinary tract infection hospitalization
- Alizadeh, N., Vahdat, K., Shashaani, S., Swann, J. L., & Ozaltin, O. Y. (2024), PLOS ONE, 19(6). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290215
Grants
- Collaborative Research: Calibrating Digital Twins in the Era of Big Data with Stochastic Optimization
