<Emily Zhang>

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

My research focuses on developing new analytical methods to address food-related challenges. 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 am interested in enhancing the impact of interventions that promote social good. I am also interested in the design and analysis of combinatorial algorithms.

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.

You can find my CV here.

Research

Approximation Algorithms for the Submodular Joint Replenishment Problem
Retsef Levi, Georgia Perakis, Emily Zhang.
Working paper.

Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Panel Data
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.

Talks

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

Reducing Food Waste through a Reservation Scheme
2023 INFORMS Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ

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

15.730 Data, Models, and Decisions for MIT Executive MBAs
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025

15.734 Introduction to Operations Management for MIT Executive MBAs
Teaching Assistant, Summer 2024

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

6.036 Introduction to Machine Learning for MIT 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