PhD Student Receives Society of Health Systems Recognition

ISE PhD candidate Iakovos Toumazis is the recipient of the 2015 Society of Health Systems Graduate Student Paper Competition award for his paper "Scheduling palliative chemotherapy treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer patients."

Co-authors were Dr. Loukia G. Karacosta, Miss Artemis Toumazi and his advisors Drs Murat Kurt and Changhyun Kwon. Iakovos will be presenting the paper at the upcoming conference which takes place on February 18-20 in Orlando, FL. Judging criteria was based on originality and soundness, applicability, methodology, organization and quality of the paper.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer with more than 135,000 estimated new cases in 2014, and the second most lethal affecting both men and women with over 50,000 estimated deaths. The number of fatalities associated with CRC has decreased during the last couple of decades (on average by 2.8% each year), mostly due to increased public awareness and improved screening and treatment methods. Despite such improvements, only about 12.9% of metastatic CRC patients survive longer than 5 years. Chemotherapy, is the prevailing treatment option to patients diagnosed with late-staged disease; either alone or combined with radiotherapy and/or targeted therapy. Chemotherapy treatment affects both cancer and normal cells. Therefore, oncologists consider the tradeoff between tumor size reduction and treatment's toxicity. In addition, oncologists often encounter tumor drug resistance, which develops after long exposure to the same drugs.

At the intersection of chemotherapy scheduling and stochastic dynamic optimization, Iakovos' doctoral studies aim to address pressing healthcare problems the physicians encounter while making decisions for colorectal cancer patients. His dissertation is projected to produce publications at the crossroads of healthcare and operations research. His research interests include applications of OR in healthcare, dynamic programming, cost-effectiveness analysis, robust optimization and network optimization. You can find more information about his work at his personal website (http://toumiak.com)