Carolina Riascos is a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, and is the current President of The Operations Research Challenge student organization. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, Austin (2016), prior to receiving her MSc in Systems Engineering from Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Mexico. Carolina’s undergraduate thesis won the Best Thesis in Industrial Engineering Award granted by Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellín Campus (2014). She was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in a joint program between Colombia and The United States.

Carolina’s research lies in the intersection of operations research and healthcare. Particularly, she is interested in the use of mixed-integer programming, dynamic programming, decision diagrams and decomposition techniques (e.g., branch and price) to solve large and complex combinatorial problems. Her main project as a PhD student focuses on the use of these techniques in kidney paired donation. Carolina has served as a session chair for the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) and as a teaching assistant for two courses, Mathematical Programming and Business Process Engineering.