Cristiana Lara, Senior Research Scientist, GDS - Modeling and Optimization, Amazon
Cristiana Lara is a Senior Research Scientist at Amazon in the Modeling and Optimization group. She has a Ph.D. in Process Systems Engineering from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on modelling and solution algorithms for large-scale optimization problems, with particular interest in applications related to supply chain network design, product assortment, and inventory placement. She was selected by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the nation’s outstanding early-career engineers invited to attend the 2021 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium, and received the inaugural INFORMS Early Career Practitioner Award in 2024.
Webinar Takeaways:
The choice between academia and industry does not need to be binary. Depending on your goals, you can shape your career to have business impact in your organization while also contributing to the knowledge in the OR/OM field.
Depending on your organization, it may take more self-motivation to keep your academic relevance through publications, seminars, and conferences. However, this hard work pays off as it increases your external value as a research scientist.
Some of the things that can help are: to keep up with the academic literature, learn about other topics that you may not have explored during your PhD, leverage your academic contacts to get invited to give lectures and seminars, see if your organization gives you the opportunity to collaborate with academia and if so take advantage of it, attend and present at conferences, share about your research (public available information such as future talks and new publications) on social media, apply to industry-focused awards.
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