Anahita Khojandi, PhD

Heath Endowed Faculty Fellow in Business & Engineering and Associate Professor

Biography

Anahita Khojandi is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Heath Endowed Faculty Fellow in Business & Engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include decision making under uncertainty and partial information, machine learning, and reinforcement learning, with applications in healthcare and genomics, environmental engineering and sustainability, intelligent transportation systems, manufacturing, and maintenance optimization.

Dr. Khojandi's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Energy (DOE), among others. In 2023, she was awarded the NIH's Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (NIH AIM-AHEAD) Fellowship in Leadership. She currently serves as the Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition and has previously served as the chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee at INFORMS. She is a member of INFORMS, IISE, and IEEE.

• • University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, Assistant Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2014-2020
  • University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, Associate Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2020-present

Courses Taught

Engineering Statistics

Introduction to Reliability Engineering

Stochastic Processes

Advanced Topics: Decision Making

Applied Data Science

Research

Methodologies

• Markov decision processes
• Dynamic programming
• Predictive analytics
• Reinforcement learning
• Time series analysis
• Anomaly detection
• Applied probability and statistics

Applications

• Medical decision making
• Environmental engineering and sustainability
• Civil infrastructure planning
• Intelligent transportation system
• Maintenance optimization
• Advanced manufacturing

Education

• PhD, Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh
• MS, Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh
• BS, Industrial Engineering, Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran)