The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, which recognizes
research excellence in the broad field of management science, has awarded its 2005
Pierskalla Award in health care and management science to Eva
Lee, a professor
of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lee was recognized for her research in emergency treatment response and real-time
staff allocation for bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreak.

The research, a collaboration with Siddhartha Maheshwary and Dr. Jacquelyn Mason at the Centers for Disease Control, was cited as timely and innovative, advancing research frontiers of both management science and health care services. The award is named after Dr. William Pierskalla to recognize his contribution and dedication to improving health services research and delivery through operations research.

Lee's research focuses on novel mathematical modeling and computational advances for medical and biomedical investigations, developing realistic mathematical models, algorithmic strategies and clinical decision-support systems to help analyze large-scale biological, DNA/genomic and clinical data. Her medical/biomedical research includes novel pattern recognition and classification algorithms for early disease diagnosis and prediction, target therapeutic intervention and disease monitoring; analysis of clinical treatment modalities and design of optimal and combination treatment regimens, and drug delivery for cancer; and health care outcome analysis and development of prediction rules for treatment effectiveness, and design of improved treatment regimens.

In 1996, Lee received the NSF CAREER Young Investigator Award for research on integer programming and parallel algorithms. She was the recipient of the prestigious Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Grant for Young Investigators in 2000 for her work on novel biological imaging and combined optimal treatment for prostate cancer. She is the first industrial engineering researcher to receive this award. She also received an NSF Information Technology Research Award for her work on computational advances for cancer therapeutics in 2003.

She has received six patents on innovative medical systems and devices, one of which is currently under FDA review for approval for clinical use in the treatment of prostate cancer.

Lee received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with highest distinction from Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her Ph.D degree in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in 1993. After graduation, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the NSF Center for Parallel Computation, and in 1995, she was an NSF/NATO postdoctoral fellow in Scientific Computing at Konrad-Zuse Zentrum Informationstechnik Berlin.