The INFORMS HAS student liaison team recently interviewed Dr. Pengyi Shi, Associate Professor in the Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, and current President of INFORMS HAS.
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 Dr. Pengyi Shi,
INFORMS HAS President
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In an open and thoughtful conversation, Dr. Shi reflected on the experiences, decisions, challenges, and sources of support that have shaped her academic journey, research philosophy, and leadership vision for HAS. She generously shared not only the achievements and opportunities that contributed to her success, but also the difficult moments behind that journey, including the uncertainty, pressure, and persistence involved in building an academic career. Her reflections offer our members a fuller and more realistic understanding of the stories behind success: the role of mentorship, the importance of staying close to meaningful real-world problems, the courage to continue pursuing work one cares deeply about, and the patience needed to grow through both setbacks and opportunities. Through this interview, Dr. Shi provides valuable insights for students, junior scholars, and the broader HAS community as they navigate their own paths in healthcare research.
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Dr. Shi’s research focuses on healthcare operations, using stochastic modeling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and optimization to improve healthcare delivery. Her work began primarily in patient flow and has since expanded to areas including substance use treatment, criminal justice, and home-based care for elderly patients. Her interdisciplinary path, spanning applied mathematics, industrial engineering, and statistics, has shaped a flexible research mindset. Rather than being tied to one method, she emphasizes choosing the right tools to solve practically meaningful problems.
An early personal experience first drew Dr. Shi toward healthcare. In her first week of college, she suffered an arm injury that led to the discovery of a bone tumor. Despite severe pain and the need for urgent care, she experienced firsthand the difficulty of obtaining a hospital bed in an overcrowded system. That experience stayed with her and later motivated her to use industrial engineering and operations research tools to address healthcare system challenges.
Dr. Shi also shared reflective insights on the early challenges of academic life. During her doctoral studies, she struggled with demanding mathematical coursework, but the support of her advisors helped her build a strong technical foundation. As a junior faculty member, she faced another difficult period during her third-year review, when she was warned that she might fail tenure. Although she could have shifted toward easier-to-publish, theory-driven work, she chose to continue pursuing healthcare problems she cared deeply about. With encouragement from mentors, peers, and senior faculty, she persevered and eventually found her path as an independent scholar.
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Several research projects stood out in Dr. Shi’s reflections. One early project on discharge management, later published in Operations Research and recognized with multiple awards, helped her understand how to formulate a real healthcare problem, develop rigorous methodology, and translate part of the work into hospital practice. Another major project, conducted with her PhD student, focused on community corrections and substance use disorder, where reinforcement learning was used to support decision-making in a complex service system, and the resulting work was later adopted by a collaborating agency to justify staffing needs. More recently, Dr. Shi has been working with nurse managers, hospitals, and home care agencies on an AI-enabled staffing tool, with three hospitals participating in a feasibility pilot.
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Dr. Pengyi Shi presenting her work
on a hospital project
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As HAS President, Dr. Shi hopes to strengthen connections across students, junior faculty, senior faculty, and practitioners. She described HAS as her “home society” and highlighted several ongoing initiatives, including coffee sessions at the upcoming healthcare conference for PhD students, early-career faculty, and mid-career faculty. She also discussed the expansion of HAS online seminar series, including an international seminar series that spotlights PhD students and postdocs, as well as seminars that feature junior faculty and practitioner perspectives.
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For PhD students, Dr. Shi offered two pieces of advice. First, students should embrace AI tools because they can increase productivity. At the same time, she cautioned that AI does not lower the expectations for PhD research. Instead, by saving time on tasks such as coding, AI raises the bar for originality, creativity, and critical thinking. Second, she emphasized that students must continue talking to practitioners and engaging with the people whose problems they aim to solve. AI can help organize and support that work, but it cannot replace the insight gained from being close to real-world problems.
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Dr. Pengyi Shi with her alma mater’s mascot
at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta
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Dr. Shi closed with an optimistic message for the HAS community. Healthcare remains one of the most important and exciting research areas, with new developments in drugs, care delivery, virtual health, and AI-enabled decision support. She encouraged the community to continue joining forces, advancing healthcare research, and working step by step toward improving a complex and often broken healthcare system.
Read the Full Interview: Full Interview with INFORMS HAS President, Dr. Pengyi Shi