Alexander Estes joins ISR faculty

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This fall the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) is pleased to welcome our newest faculty member, Alexander (Alex) Estes. Estes holds a joint appointment with ISR and the Department of Decision, Operations, and Information Technology in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. His research interests include integrating prediction tasks with optimization to improve the quality of decisions made in the face of uncertainty while making efficient use of the available data, using optimization techniques to conduct data science tasks, and applications of these areas in air transportation.

Estes earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2013, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Scientific Computation in 2018. He was advised by ISR and Smith School faculty member Michael Ball, now Professor Emeritus. In his dissertation, Estes studied optimization and data science methods to support Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decisions regarding air traffic management initiatives—actions taken to prevent excess congestion in the national airspace.

After graduation, Estes joined the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota as a Target Industrial Postdoctoral Researcher. In this role, he applied optimization techniques at the retailer Target Brands, Inc., to assist their planning of distribution center operations and store stocking policies. From 2020 to 2022, Estes was an assistant professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has now rejoined the University of Maryland in this tenure-track faculty joint appointment.

Estes will be an active member of the eight-university NEXTOR III consortium, an FAA Consortium in Aviation Operations Research under contract to the FAA, supporting research on a wide range of aviation topics, including air traffic management and control; safety data analysis; communication, data collection, and distribution; human factors; system performance and assessment measures; and aviation economics. Currently in its third phase of contract funding, the consortium has been in operation since 1996.

ISR is happy to welcome Alex Estes back to the University of Maryland, and to its faculty!

Published August 24, 2022