Faculty Exchange Gives Positive Experience

Faculty Exchange Gives Positive Experience

Ana Groznik Ana Groznik is an assistant professor at Faculdade de Ciências Económicas e Empresariais (FCEE), Universidade Católica Portuguesa, who spent the fall 2010 Semester at Carnegie Mellon. She traveled to Pittsburgh to participate in the Faculty Exchange program, launched by the Carnegie Mellon Portugal partnership. She considered her experience at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, one of the top business schools in the world, “definitively a very positive experience.”

Ana’s goals were to start a new research stream, adopt new research tools, expand her personal network, and get a fresh perspective on teaching quantitative courses. She had several meetings with her host Alan Scheller-Wolf, faculty of Operations Management at theTepper School of Business, to discuss several potential research topics, primarily in the context of health care. They decided to focus on the management of diagnostic service centers which advise patients about appropriate treatments over the phone, based on their symptoms. When managing such centers, a balance must be found between the accuracy of advice given, callers’ waiting times and operational costs. Groznik is studying the optimization of management of nurse-line and other advice centers through analytical models. “I had an excellent chance to broaden my research experience, as well as to observe and learn from one of the best teaching practices in the field”, concludes Groznik.

February 2011