I do not believe teaching is confined by the walls of the classroom or the boundaries of the university. I am passionate about talking to the public about science, engineering, operations research, and analytics. I especially enjoy talking about my research. Operations researchers and industrial engineers make important contributions to basic science and important applications, yet what we do has been a well kept secret. This is why I agree to give public talks about my research whenever I can. Doing so gives me an opportunity to educate the general public and improve scientific literacy. I have always hypothesized that most people would appreciate the work we do if they knew more about it. My experiences suggest that my hypothesis is true.

I gave a talk that was recorded on campus in the Spring. It aired on the University Place series on July 23, 2018 on Wisconsin Public Television, Madison’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) station. My talk aired the same day as the Great Wisconsin Baking Challenge: Week 5 Pies Recap. What great company! You’ve gotta love public television 🙂

Here is my talk title and description:

Advanced Analytics: From Emergency Response to Brackets

University of Wisconsin-Madison Industrial and Systems Engineering professor Laura Albert will talk about how engineers use math models and analytics to solve problems and design systems. She will provide an overview her discipline of operations research and advanced analytics and will discuss its wide ranging applications, focusing on examples from her research that addresses problems in emergency response and bracketology.

You can watch the video on PBS using the link below. The talk has closed captioning. My dad endorsed the video and told me he particularly liked the graphics in my talk.
https://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/3014502909/

The unedited talk is on YouTube:

I gave an earlier version of this talk at the Middleton Public Library for their “Scholar’d for Life” lecture series. The lecture series is in partnership with the UW Madison Speaker’s Bureau (my profile is here). Taking the “Wisconsin Idea” as its starting point, this series aims to promote lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and engagement between academics and the community as a whole.

The organizers at the library asked me to speak about applications of industrial engineering. I thought that no one would show up for a talk marketed like that. I was wrong. About 100 people showed up for my talk. It was a packed house! The attendees were really engaged and asked me many questions after the talk.

I was thrilled that a few kids in middle school and high school came to my Middleton Public Library talk, including girls. I try to embody the spirit of the #ILookLikeAnEngineer movement in my public engagements to challenge stereotypes about engineering. One of the girls who attended the talk told me I reminded her of Lucy Wilde from Despicable Me 2 and showed me this picture:

I’m not sure if Lucy is my doppelganger, but I certainly like her hair and style 🙂