The Department of Industrial Engineering is pleased to announce the hiring of Çağlar Çağlayan as an assistant professor. Çağlayan earned his B.S. in Industrial Engineering at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey in 2011. He earned his M.S. in Industrial Engineering at NC State University in 2013, and an M.S. in Operations Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015. Çağlayan will soon complete his Ph.D. in Operations Research at the Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2018.
Çağlayan has demonstrated excellence as a researcher with rich experiences at the Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. Most recently, he worked as a research trainee at the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
We encourage you in welcoming our newest faculty member to Clemson University, and in getting to know Çağlayan with our quick Q&A introduction.
What types of courses do you teach?
Operations Research courses such as linear programming, stochastic optimization, queuing theory, etc. A course I am particularly interested in is “Math of OR”, which will cover a variety of fundamental topics in Operations Research and provide the students with a rigorous mathematical background on key OR/IE subjects.
What are your research interests?
My expertise is in “data-driven (clinical) decision-making under uncertainty”. In particular, I focus on medical decision-making problems for disease management (control, prevention, detection and treatment) and health service operations (staffing, routing, etc.) and conduct data-driven research with methodological contributions and clinically impactful findings. In my research, I use a variety of analytical methods including Optimization, Queuing Theory, Survival Analysis, Simulation and Deep Learning.
What brought you to this field?
Healthcare is a fascinating field, where there are plenty of pressing and important problems with potential for broad societal impacts. This has been very appealing to me.
When will you be joining Clemson University?
I will be doing a 1-year post-doc at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland before joining the IE department of Clemson University, so I expect to begin in August 2019, or the Fall 2019 semester.
What are you most looking forward to about Clemson University?
Interaction (teaching + research) with Clemson IE students and working together with such a distinguished faculty. I spent a fair amount of time with the staff, faculty and students and observed that Clemson IE is a very welcoming department, where the relations between faculty and students are close, the students are hardworking and motivated, and faculty is not only smart (as expected from a great IE department) but also super fun (which is a little surprising). Being a part of this atmosphere will be very exciting and I am looking forward to it.
