Hospitals, researchers and clinicians often have limited resources, whether that’s staff, time or the number of animals to use in an experiment.
That’s where operations research comes in. It’s a framework involving artificial intelligence and advanced data techniques to optimize decision support systems.
“We use quantitative math decision-making models to address unmet needs in health care and cancer care,” said UF Health Cancer Institute member Fatemeh Nosrat, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UF Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “We work with clinicians who have access to rich data and we work a secondary analysis on that data to provide more information, like how they can treat patients next time to improve the outcome.”
Sometimes those outcomes are on a small scale, such as improving an individual patient’s treatment, and sometimes they are on a larger scale, such as improving how a hospital emergency department uses limited resources to maximize patient volume.
The work can also be predictive, using data to identify high- and low-risk patients to prioritize who undergoes cancer screenings and receives which treatment.
“We don’t want one-size-fits-all treatment for all patients; we want to know what patient should receive what treatment at what time point,” Nosrat said. “We want to personalize the treatment for the patient. We also want to improve patients’ quality of life after treatment.”
Ultimately, operations research — a subset of industrial engineering — is about resource management.
“We can help researchers use their limited resources to better translate results to humans,” said Nosrat, who earned her doctorate in industrial engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Nosrat joined the University of Florida in 2025 after completing postdoctoral work at Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Department of Radiation Oncology. There, her research informed guidelines on adaptive radiotherapy for patients with head and neck cancer. The cancer center has now adopted those guidelines into clinical care, personalizing treatment for patients.
Nosrat’s experience seeing children undergoing cancer treatment at MD Anderson motivates her to push the field forward.
“My goal is to give everyone the hope of living joyfully,” she said.
Now, she’s building bridges across the University of Florida to foster collaborations in the burgeoning field.
“I want the UF Health Cancer Institute to be a pioneer in operations research and optimization,” Nosrat said.
Outside of her research, Nosrat is an avid marathon runner who has completed more than 20 marathons, often dedicating her efforts to supporting cancer research. She is pursuing the personal goal of completing a marathon in all 50 U.S. states and then in countries around the world.
Inspired by the patients and families she has encountered throughout her career, Nosrat remains committed to one mission: using digital twins, AI, optimization and innovation to create a future where every patient receives more personalized, effective and compassionate care.
