Sara Shashaani
Assistant Professor
- Phone: 919.515.6400
- Email: sshasha2@ncsu.edu
- Office: 4175 Fitts-Woolard Hall
- Website: https://shashaani.wordpress.ncsu.edu
Sara Shashaani joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2019. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she worked on designing and improving probabilistic predictive models, specifically used for hurricane-induced power outages, with challenges in highly imbalanced datasets and a large set of explanatory variables. Her dissertation research in the area of derivative-free simulation optimization awarded her a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 2016. Besides her research, she is passionate about activities that target the environment, community wellness, and science communication.
Research Interests
Shashaani’s research interests include stochastic optimization and Monte Carlo simulation methodology, theory and algorithms, their integration with data science and analytics, and their applications in long-term important problems in society such as sustainability and environment resiliency, energy infrastructure systems, healthcare, transportation, and human behavior modeling and economics.
Shashaani’s personal research website
Education
| Degree | Program | School | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial Engineering | Purdue University | 2016 |
| MSISEOR | Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Operations Research | Virginia Tech | 2014 |
| MSIE | Master of Science in Industrial Engineering | Purdue University | 2011 |
| BSIE | Bachelor of Science in Applied Computing | Southern Cross University | 2009 |
| BSIE | Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering | Iran University of Science and Technology | 2008 |
Honors and Awards
- 2021 | Faculty Research and Professional Development Award, North Carolina State University
- 2020 | Finalist in Best Service Science Paper Competition, Service Science Cluster of INFORMS
- 2019 | Outstanding Reviewer Award, Winter Simulation Conference
- 2016 | Best Student Paper Award, Ph.D. Colloquium, Winter Simulation Conference
- 2015 | Ross Fellowship Award, Purdue University
- 2014 | Outstanding Teaching Assistant, ISE Virginia Tech
- 2012 | Visiting Researcher Summer Scholarship, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & Virginia Tech
Discover more about Sara Shashaani
Publications
- Diagnostic Tools for Evaluating and Comparing Simulation- Optimization Algorithms
- Eckman, D. J., Henderson, S. G., & Shashaani, S. (2023, January 5), INFORMS JOURNAL ON COMPUTING, Vol. 1. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.1261
- SimOpt: A Testbed for Simulation-Optimization Experiments
- Eckman, D. J., Henderson, S. G., & Shashaani, S. (2023, March 9), INFORMS JOURNAL ON COMPUTING, Vol. 3. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2023.1273
- Improved feature selection with simulation optimization
- Shashaani, S., & Vahdat, K. (2022, May 30), OPTIMIZATION AND ENGINEERING, Vol. 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11081-022-09726-3
- Personalized Predictions for Unplanned Urinary Tract Infection Hospitalizations with Hierarchical Clustering
- Mao, L., Vahdat, K., Shashaani, S., & Swann, J. L. (2022), In Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics (pp. 453–465). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75166-1_34
- Robust Simulation Optimization with Stratification
- Jain, P., Shashaani, S., & Byon, E. (2022), 2022 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). https://doi.org/10.1109/wsc57314.2022.10015515
- Improved Complexity Of Trust-Region Optimization For Zeroth-Order Stochastic Oracles with Adaptive Sampling
- Ha, Y., Shashaani, S., & Tran-Dinh, Q. (2021), 2021 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). https://doi.org/10.1109/wsc52266.2021.9715529
- Non-Parametric Uncertainty Bias and Variance Estimation via Nested Bootstrapping and Influence Functions
- Vahdat, K., & Shashaani, S. (2021), 2021 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). https://doi.org/10.1109/wsc52266.2021.9715420
- Parameter Calibration with Stratified Adaptive Stochastic Trust-region Optimization
- , (2021). INFORMS Workshop on Quality, Statistics, and Reliability.
- Wake Effect Calibration in Wind Power Systems with Adaptive Sampling Based Optimization
- Jain, P., Shashaani, S., & Byon, E. (2021), IISE Annual Conference Proceedings, 43–48. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/wake-effect-calibration-wind-power-systems-with/docview/2560890092
- A SIMULATION OPTIMIZATION APPROACH FOR MANAGING PRODUCT TRANSITIONS IN MULTISTAGE PRODUCTION LINES
- Manda, A. B., Gopalswamy, K., Shashaani, S., & Uzsoy, R. (2020), 2020 WINTER SIMULATION CONFERENCE (WSC), pp. 1730–1741. https://doi.org/10.1109/wsc48552.2020.9384036
