Melike Baykal-Gürsoy, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rutgers and the director for the Laboratory of Stochastic Systems. She teaches courses in optimization, stochastic processes, queueing theory, inventory control, process modeling and control, and time series analysis.

Baykal-Gürsoy’s research interests include stochastic processes, Markov decision processes (MDPs), stochastic games, queuing and their applications to modeling, and optimization and control of stochastic systems such as transportation, telecommunications, and supply chain infrastructure.

Her projects include work in analysis and mitigation of congestion; research in infrastructure security, minimizing the effect of extreme weather events on human health; stochastic optimization algorithms for adjustment of inventories in supply chains; resource allocation in emergency management; dynamic traffic flow management under incidents; and stochastic games applied to the infrastructure security problems.

Baykal-Gürsoy’s has received grants from NSF, the United Nations, U.S. Department of Defense, Rutgers’ Transportation Coordinating Council (supported with a grant from the Federal Transit Administration), the Rutgers University Center for Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Response, and Rutgers’ Academic Excellence Fund.