YinzOR2021

The 2021 YinzOR Student Conference, the 4th YinzOR Conference, was hosted virtually on August 28th by co-chairs Mik Zlatin and Tom Krumpolc. The conference provided an opportunity for students whose research is in Operations Research, Management Science, Industrial Engineering, and other related fields to interact with each other. This year, we were excited to host two Plenary speakers: Christian Tjandraatmadja from Google Research and Junyu Cao from the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin. We also had four academic researchers: Zhen Lian from Cornell GSM, Arielle Anderer from the Wharton School of Business, Aida Rahmattalabi from the University of Southern California, and Pol Boada-Collado from Northwestern IEMS. Although the virtual format was different than usual, this conference was a great success! We had participation from over 35 different universities and over 100 registrants. We encouraged participant interaction during lunch via a social pairings event for all participants to sign-up and network with fellow attendees. We also had 6 fantastic video submissions for our video talk contest. Congratulations to our winners! The event concluded with a discussion panel on post-PhD career plans, in which the event speakers described their journeys and answered a wide range of questions from audience members.