When Vahideh Manshadi came to Yale SOM to interview for an assistant professor of operations position in 2014, she was eager to discuss the work that mattered most to her.
“I presented my research on the operation of living organ donation for kidney transplants, looking at how tools from operations research can increase the number of patients who receive transplants and also shorten their waiting times,” Manshadi says. “It was all about improving the lives of this group of patients.”
Manshadi had just finished a postdoctoral position at the Operations Research Center at MIT, and she was eager to land her first teaching job. At Yale, she found the right fit. “My research resonated, because SOM is a school that really cares about both the business and society angles,” she says.
Today, as SOM’s Michael H. Jordan Professor of Operations, Manshadi teaches the popular elective Data Science, a course previously known as Big Data.
“The whole idea of the course—and it aligns perfectly with my own research—is that there are a lot of opportunities for data-driven decision-making out there,” she says. “We all know that very sophisticated companies, like Netflix and Uber, know how to use analytics and their data really well. But there are untapped opportunities for other companies that also collect a lot of data and may not be leveraging it. Our students learn how to access and utilize this data for organizations.”
A native of Iran, Manshadi studied electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. “Electrical engineering was a pretty common path to take in my home country,” she recalls. She went on to receive master’s degrees in statistics and electrical engineering and a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
During her PhD studies, Manshadi was exposed to operations research tools in an online advertising application, and something clicked. “I like math, but I found that I also like being connected to the real world and real-world applications. Operations research is a field that’s a perfect combination,” she says.
“It has a variety of applications in different contexts and different sectors. Over time I got more and more interested in applications that benefit society.”
Manshadi’s current research focuses on improving online matching platforms, especially those with social impact, including volunteer crowdsourcing, refugee resettlement, organ allocation, and news platforms. She has collaborated with national nonprofits, including Feeding America’s MealConnect, Food Rescue US, VolunteerMatch, and national kidney exchange programs. She also serves as the research director for operations research at the Center for Algorithms, Data, and Market Design at Yale.
“My research model is to form partnerships with nonprofit organizations, mainly tech nonprofits,” Manshadi says. “We look at their data and try to find ways that they can improve their systems.”
Manshadi draws on her research in teaching the Data Science course, which seeks to help students recognize weaknesses in an organization’s operations that can be improved through data applications. “The question we ask is what kind of data sources you can use to gain insights into whatever challenge an organization is facing,” she says.
Building on students’ coursework in statistics, Manshadi focuses on teaching them how to identify and tease out data patterns.
“Traditional statistics is not necessarily well-suited to working with large, high-dimensional data sets,” she explains. “I teach what I call ‘Statistics 2.0.’ These are recent techniques that are tailored for large data sets.”
A diverse student cohort enrolls in Data Science every year. “We have students with engineering, math, and STEM backgrounds,” Manshadi says. “It’s a natural elective for them, but we also get students with other kinds of backgrounds, so inclusivity is very important. We want them all to discover the relevance of data analysis in their goals.”
Manshadi says she works to make her classroom welcoming for women and students from all over the world.
“Once in a while, one of our international students, will come to me and share that they feel included in class, and they feel comfortable reaching out to me before or after class,” she says. “As an international, it means a lot.”
Her students, Manshadi says, are friendly, collaborative, and technically adept. “I’m surprised every year at the level of their technical skills,” she says. “They like the idea of confronting a technical challenge and saying, ‘OK, let me do something. Let me build something and figure this out.’”
