Jialei Chen, a Ph.D. student in the H. Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and a research assistant in the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, was awarded the Ellis R. Ott Scholarship For Applied Statistics and Quality Management from the American Society for Quality. The Ellis R. Ott Scholarship Governing Board selected Chen to receive this year's award in the Ph.D. category and he will receive a check in the amount of $7,500.

Chen’s research interests are in statistical modeling, machine learning, and experimental design with applications to mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare. He is especially interested in engineering-driven data analytics for real-world challenges.

One of Chen’s research topics is to improve the surgical success rate of a common, yet severe heart disease called aortic stenosis. Specifically, he developed a 3D-printing-enabled “virtual patient” framework for in-vitro studies as pre-surgical planning. In order to make the “virtual patient” pathologically identical to the actual patient, he proposed to use a bio-inspired metamaterial design and a statistical emulation model for structure optimization. With the proposed method, the printed heart can mimic both the geometry and the mechanical property of a specific patient.

He previously worked on chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy with the goal of developing new impedance sensing hardware and software.

Chen’s current research focuses on tackling two healthcare challenges resulting from COVID-19 by developing novel methodologies in the fields of statistics, quality engineering, and advanced manufacturing. The healthcare problems he is addressing include how to improve the recovery rate of a treatment, and how to reduce the cost to make the treatment available to everyone.