Boland's interest in applying mathematics in industry began as a Ph.D. student when she had the opportunity to design a program to automate the complicated task of airline crew scheduling. This pioneering work brought her under the wing of one of the founding fathers of integer programming, ISyE’s own George Nemhauser. Now, Boland is acknowledged as the Australian expert in the field of integer programming.

Boland was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Western Australia for her work on operations research using continuous optimization techniques in 1992. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.

Boland’s consulting work has aided many business and government organizations to more effectively manage their resources, at both the operational and strategic levels. She has specific experience in the areas of transport logistics, supply chain management, inventory and production scheduling, across industries such as defense, mining, air transport and manufacturing. She has used her skills as a teacher in the development of workshops and in-house training seminars for companies, to bring them up to date with the latest tools and techniques in operations research.