Ph.D. student · Information Systems & Management · Operations Research · Carnegie Mellon University
I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Information Systems and Management at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy, advised by Peter Zhang and Woody (Shixiang) Zhu. I build operations research models that guide high-stakes policy decisions in healthcare and supply chains. My work brings together optimization, stochastic modeling and equilibrium analysis with AI and machine learning, with the goal of designing systems that stay efficient, resilient and equitable under uncertainty.
Supply chains & networks
A multi-tier equilibrium model of global supply chains built on variational inequality theory, extended with stochastic demand and costs. It shows how cost asymmetries and uncertainty amplify inefficiency when decisions are decentralized.
How Laplacian eigenvalues and algebraic connectivity relate to the mixing time of random walks, studied through spectral decomposition and simulation in Python.
Healthcare & public policy
How socioeconomic disparities and vaccine hesitancy shape outbreak intensity across North America. Uninsured rates strongly predict outbreak intensity in the U.S., while behavioral and access factors dominate in Canada.
Processed 3 TB of voter registration records on a high-performance computing cluster to find inconsistencies and demographic anomalies that bias election policy analysis.
Applied econometrics
A tract-level study of LA County combining ACS, county income and GIS data with geographic fixed effects. Education, poverty and labor-market conditions explain much of the variation, but localized disparities persist.
A 2012–2025 panel for the U.S., China and Malaysia, estimated with OLS and Newey–West errors. Big Mac prices track fast-food inflation in the U.S. but diverge elsewhere because of structural pricing differences.
I’m happy to talk about operations research, healthcare and supply chain policy, or possible collaborations. Email is the best way to reach me: miriamz@andrew.cmu.edu
LinkedIn ↗