Management assistant prof wins junior researcher best paper award

A Department of Management researcher has won junior researcher best paper award recognition from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the Multi Criteria Decision Making community.

The organization’s “MCDM Junior Researcher Best Paper Award”  was presented to M. Gabriela Sava, assistant professor in the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business at Clemson University during the INFORMS annual meeting in November.

The award annually recognizes outstanding papers in the field of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) by a junior researcher, or a team of junior researchers. Sava teamed with Luis G. Vargas and Jerrold H. May, University of Pittsburgh and James G. Dolan, University of Rochester (N.Y.) on the winning paper, “An Analysis of the Sensitivity and Stability of Patients’ Preferences can Lead to More Appropriate Medical Decisions,” which was published in Annals of Operations Research journal.

Multi Criteria Decision Making is a sub-discipline of Operations research that evaluates multiple conflicting criteria, in daily life and in settings such as business, government and medicine to support the decision maker and the decision-making process.

Sava’s research examines a medical decision-making setting, the colorectal cancer screening problem, where patients are faced with multiple alternatives when choosing the preferred screening option and the decision is made based on multiple criteria pre-determined by the healthcare provider. The research shows that insights derived from the sensitivity and stability analysis of patients’ preferences, developed by Sava et al., can be used by the health-care provider in the medical decision-making process to understand the evolution of patients’ preferences as they are presented with additional medical information at the criteria level.

“It’s been a great honor for me to be selected as a winner of the INFORMS MCDM Junior Researcher Best Paper,” Sava said. “This would have not been possible without the continuous mentoring of professors Luis Vargas and Jerrold May and the fructuous collaboration with Dr. James Dolan, who provided the needed clinician’s perspective. I would also like to thank professor Birsen Karpak of Youngstown State University for the nomination and the MCDM committee for selecting me as the winner.”

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