Vala Rahmati

Ph.D. candidate, Operations Research and Engineering Management

Research Interests: Vala's research focuses on applying operations research to disaster management, developing methods that improve how relief supplies and evacuation efforts are planned and coordinated under uncertainty. He designs time-expanded network models to represent how disasters unfold over time, helping decision-makers plan more effective response strategies. His methodological work centers on decomposition-based optimization techniques, which he uses to make these large-scale, uncertain network problems solvable at practical scale.

Road to the Moody School: Vala earned his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, where he developed a strong foundation in data analytics and optimization. He entered his PhD directly from his undergraduate studies, drawn to SMU's Lyle School of Engineering for the opportunity to work with Prof. Halit Üster on large-scale network optimization. As a research assistant, he has focused on applying operations research to disaster response, work that has grown into a dissertation on network optimization and transportation.