The Guikema Research Group consists of Professor Guikema and the postdocs, PhD students, master’s students, and undergraduate students conducting research in the group. The current members of the group follow.
Julia Coxen: Julia is a PhD student at the University of Michigan’s Industrial and Operations Engineering Department. She is an active duty Lieutenant Colonel and recently finished battalion command with the US Army Special Operations Command where she worked extensively with their data initiative. She was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at the US Military Academy, West Point and has held various military leadership assignments from South Korea to North Carolina to Afghanistan. Her research interests include critical infrastructure planning, machine learning, network analysis and optimization.
Elnaz Kabir: Elnaz’s research interests are in the usage and creation of online and offline data-driven methods to make better predictions. Her research is mainly focused on developing statistical methods for learning from imbalanced data sets. She is currently working on two projects including tree risk assessment during storms and modeling the weather related power outages. In addition to her PhD in Industrial and Operations Engineering, Elnaz is partaking in the dual master’s program offered by the Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan.Zaira Pagan Cajigas: Zaira is a first year PhD student in the group whose research focuses on community resilience to natural hazards.
Tessa Swanson: Tessa researches methods to model complex systems for understanding and addressing urban resilience, particularly via transportation applications. Tessa believes equitable access to opportunities and resources is key to climate change adaptation, disaster mitigation, and sustainability and seeks to evaluate and design infrastructure solutions that address disparities in access to enable resilient communities.
Valerie Washington: Valerie Washington a pre-candidate PhD who is interested in the application of operations research and risk analysis to climate resilience and flood mitigation. Her current research includes using agent-based simulation models to understand the impacts of seasonal floods on communities, and the influence of income-based flood insurance subsidies on flood mitigation strategies employed by those communities.
Anna White: Anna is an IOE pre-candidate whose research application areas are in public transportation and urban systems. Her hope is to use data and mathematical modeling to improve those systems with three primary motivators: To improve access of people to their desired destinations, to increase safety from a national security standpoint and to reduce our global climate impact by reducing emissions. She is also a part of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Certificate Program in the Ford Policy School hopes to use her research to inform policy decisions, particularly in the areas of public transportation and national security.
Tim Williams: Tim’s research focuses on modeling the interplay between food security and food, energy, and water systems, with a focus in Ethiopia. He is building an agent-based model to explore the effect of household-level decision making and exogenous intervention strategies on these outcomes.