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Amy Cohn

 

 

Amy Mainville Cohn received the A.B. in Applied Mathematics, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in June, 1991. She studied with Professor Myron Fiering, writing an honors thesis entitled Multiple Organ Failure: A Model for Treatment Optimization. After graduation, she worked for five years as an analyst and manager at Princeton Transportation Consulting Group, a software company providing decision support tools to the trucking industry.

 

Professor Cohn received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. Her research advisor was Professor Cynthia Barnhart. The title of her dissertation was Composite Variable Modeling for Large-Scale Problems in Transportation and Logistics. This dissertation received Honorable Mention in the 2003 INFORMS Aviation Application Dissertation Prize competition.

 

In 2002, Professor Cohn joined the faculty at the University of Michigan College of Engineering as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering. She is also affiliated with the NSF Engineering Research Center on Reconfigurable Manufacturing, the MIT Global Airline Industry Program, and the Sloan Industry Studies Program.

 

Professor Cohn's teaching interests include linear programming, large-scale optimization, and modeling. She has been awarded the Alpha Pi Mu undergraduate teaching award three times and received the Holt Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005 and 2007. She is a faculty advisor for the Michigan student chapter of SWE (Society of Women Engineers).

 

The primary focus of Professor Cohn's research is in developing models and algorithms for solving large-scale transportation and logistics problems. Current topics include:

-- Robust airline planning (in collaboration with Peter Belobaba of MIT)

-- Sequencing and scheduling of automotive stamping facilities (in collaboration with Ford Motor Co.)

-- Methods for conducting combinatorial auctions without explicit enumeration of all bids (in collaboration with Damian Beil and Amitabh Sinha of the Ross School of Business)

-- Healthcare scheduling (in collaboration with Joseph Norman of the University of Michigan Medical School)

-- Parallel optimization techniques in high-performance computing

--Long-term commitment planning for wind farms (in collaboration with Duncan Callaway of the School of Natural Resources and Energy)

 

Professor Cohn is married to Jonathan Cohn, a writer for The New Republic and the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Healthcare Crisis -- And the People Who Pay the Price. They have two sons, Tommy and Peter, and live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.