Taking Leave

On Monday I started a full-time job at RTI International in Durham, NC. At the end of the semester, I am going on a leave of absence from the PhD program in operations research at North Carolina State University. I finished my masters of operations research in May, and I am putting the PhD on hold. I made this decision for a number of reasons that I’m not going to go in to here.

If you’ve never heard of RTI, I cannot explain it to you better than our website:

RTI is an independent, nonprofit institute that provides research, development, and technical services to government and commercial clients worldwide. Our mission is to improve the human condition by turning knowledge into practice.

Established in 1958 as the Research Triangle Institute, RTI has a distinguished history of scientific achievement in the areas of health and pharmaceuticals, education and training, surveys and statistics, advanced technology, international development, economic and social policy, energy and the environment, and laboratory testing and chemical analysis. RTI’s staff of more than 2,800 supports projects in more than 40 countries.

RTI is the cornerstone of the Research Triangle Park which also includes companies such as IBM, Cisco Systems, Lenovo, and GlaxoSmithKline.

I am joining the Health Sciences Division where I will be doing predictive modeling problems across a variety of domains (including, but not limited to, healthcare modeling). This position is not operations research per se (depending, of course, on how one defines both “operations research” and “analytics”), but I am already finding opportunities that will blur the lines between OR and analytics problems.

My first week at RTI has been great. I’m surrounded by incredibly bright colleagues in many disciplines: statistics, math, operations research, economics, education, engineering, epidemiology, and more. For me, this gives opportunities to work on mathematical modeling problems across these many disciplines. I could hardly ask for more.