<Emily Zhang>

Hi! I am a rising fifth-year PhD student in the Operations Research Center at MIT, co-advised by Prof. Georgia Perakis and Prof. Retsef Levi.

My research develops new analytical methods to address critical problems in food systems, with the dual goals of reducing food waste and improving access to healthy food. In collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance, I am evaluating the impact of vendor additions on the utilization of a food subsidy program. In partnership with the Metropolitan Council, I am working to improve the allocation of food to local pantries. More broadly, I design models and algorithms that shape practical solutions while advancing general methodologies in optimization, causal inference, inventory management, and data-driven operations.

I completed my undergraduate studies at MIT in 2021 with a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics. I am grateful to be supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship and the Ida M. Green Fellowship.

I’m on the 2025-2026 academic job market! ⭐

📢 Upcoming Presentations

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Panel Data: Insights into the Healthy Incentives Program
INFORMS Annual Meeting
Sunday, October 26 | 2:45 PM – 4:00 PM
Session: Inference and Resource Allocation in Healthcare Systems
Room: Bldg A, Level 3, A313

Research

Approximation Algorithms for Inventory Problems with Decomposable Submodular Ordering Costs
Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.
Soon to be submitted to Mathematics of Operations Research.

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Panel Data: Insights into the Healthy Incentives Program
Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.
Major Revision at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

Reducing Food Waste through a Reservation Scheme
Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.
Major Revision at Management Science.

On the Broadcast Dimension of a Graph
Emily Zhang.
Australasian Journal of Combinatorics 85(3) (2023), 313-339.

An Upper and Lower Bound for the Convergence Time of House-Hunting in Temnothorax Ant Colonies
Emily Zhang, Jiajia Zhao, Nancy Lynch.
Journal of Computational Biology 29(4) (2022), 344-357.

CDFShop: Exploring and Optimizing Learned Index Structures
Ryan Marcus, Emily Zhang, and Tim Kraska.
ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2020.

Working Papers

The Categorical Joint Replenishment Problem
Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.

Optimizing Food Allocation in the Met Council Pantry Network
Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.

Talks

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Panel Data
2025 MSOM Sustainable Operations Management SIG Conference
2025 Annual POMS Conference
2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting
2024 Manufacturing & Services Operation Management Conference in Minneapolis, MN

Reducing Food Waste through a Reservation Scheme
2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting

An Upper and Lower Bound for the Convergence Time of House-Hunting in Temnothorax Ant Colonies
2021 8th workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms

On the Broadcast Dimension of a Graph
2020 AMS Virtual Sectional Meetings

Optimization Algorithms Given by Discretizations of the Euler-Lagrange ODE
2019 MIT IEEE Undergraduate Research Technology Conference
2019 Georgia Tech REU Poster Session
2019 Young Mathematicians Conference at The Ohio State University

Teaching Experience

MIT 15.730 Data, Models, and Decisions for Executive MBAs
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025, Rating: 6.7/7.0

MIT 15.734 Introduction to Operations Management for Executive MBAs
Teaching Assistant, Summer 2024, Rating: 6.7/7.0

MIT 15.S60 Computing in Optimization and Statistics for First-Year Doctoral Students
Instructor, Winter 2024

MIT 18.600 Probability and Random Variables for Undergraduates
Grader, Spring 2020

MIT 6.036 Introduction to Machine Learning for Undergraduates
Laboratory Assistant, Fall 2019

Professional Service

MIT ORC Seminar Series
Coordinator, Fall 2024

MIT ORC Independent Activities Period (IAP) Seminar
Coordinator, IAP 2024

MIT Undergraduate Society of Women in Mathematics (USWIM)
Publicity Chair, 2019-2021

MIT Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
Technology Chair, 2019-2020

Scholarships and Awards