Students who conduct research in operations management can enter the competition. Papers were evaluated based on quality, novelty, importance of methodology, contribution to healthcare research, and potential for impact on practice. Other finalists in this competition were from Columbia University, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Zhang’s paper, titled “A Multi-Treatment Forest Approach for Analyzing the Heterogeneous Effects of Team Familiarity,” focused on examining the effect of team familiarity on surgery duration and adding to the body of knowledge regarding team dynamics.
The study examines the effect of team familiarity — the degree to which members of a team know and understand each other due to having worked together over time — across multiple pairs of surgical practitioners (surgeon-nurse, anesthesiologist-nurse and surgeon-anesthesiologist) and whether the effect on surgery duration varies across patients.
The study compared surgery duration in three different scenarios to show the value of leveraging the varying effects of team familiarity to better match surgical teams with patients.
“I find this kind of research enjoyable because it holds the promise of enhancing the overall efficiency of healthcare operations and uncovering exciting methods that have applications in broader domains,” Zhang said.
The three primary contributions of the study were to estimate diverse effects of multiple treatments, to help healthcare providers identify patients who benefit the most from more familiar teams, and to evaluate the value of leveraging the varied effects of team familiarity to reduce surgery duration. The findings can expedite personalized healthcare by providing information about treatment effects at the subgroup or patient level.
With more than 12,500 members globally, INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) is an association for professionals in operations research, analytics, management science, economics, behavioral science, statistics, artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics and other related fields. Its Health Applications Society focuses on health applications, to identify current and potential problems and contributions to their solutions.
According to Dr. Guihua Wang, a Sydney Smith Hicks Faculty Fellow and an assistant professor in the Operations Management Area at the Jindal School, the INFORMS HAS Student Paper Competition is one of the best-known in the field.
“Our paper underwent two rounds of review by eight independent leading healthcare scholars based on criteria such as contribution to healthcare research and potential impact on practice,” said Wang, who is Zhang’s dissertation advisor. “Winning this competition not only recognizes the quality of Minmin’s research but also shows the strength of our PhD program.”
Zhang’s plans include becoming a professor and continuing in the field of research.
“The Jindal School has many excellent professors who are doing impressive research,” Zhang said. “They are my role models and give me much support. I have learned how to do rigorous research. By working on real-life problems and writing research papers, I gained skills that can be used in my future career.”
Wang, who won the INFORMS HAS Student Paper Competition in 2017 as a PhD student at the University of Michigan, described Zhang as exceptionally talented, hardworking and easy to work with.
“It has been a great pleasure serving as Minmin’s dissertation advisor,” he said. “His research has appeared or is under review in top operations management journals (e.g., the May 2023 special issue of Production and Operations Management on managing pandemics) and has been recognized by many other competitions. I am proud of his achievements so far and do not doubt that he will have a successful academic career.”
Before attending the Jindal School, Zhang attended the University of Michigan, as well as Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a top university in China.
