Assistant Professor, Industrials Systems & Engineering

Chiwei Yan joins Industrial and Systems Engineering this fall as an assistant professor. He previously worked at Uber Technologies where he was a postdoctoral research scientist and senior data scientist, leading efforts to improve its transportation platform. Chiwei designed and implemented surge-pricing algorithms that accounted for real-time supply and demand across 900 global markets.

In his research, Chiwei develops optimization models for transportation and logistics. While at MIT, Chiwei discovered that federal tarmac rules, enacted to protect fliers from being stranded on the tarmac during long delays, actually increased flight cancellations and travel times overall. He plans to tackle emerging issues in modern transportation and logistics systems, using tools from optimization, game theory, stochastic modeling and statistics, and proposing data-driven solutions for practical implementation.