Speakers
Timothy Chan
Professor, University of Toronto
| Timothy Chan is the Associate Vice-President and Vice-Provost, Strategic Initiatives at the University of Toronto, and a Professor in the department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. His primary research interests are in operations research, optimization, and applied machine learning, with applications in healthcare, medicine, sustainability, and sports. Professor Chan received his B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before coming to Toronto, he was an Associate in the Chicago office of McKinsey and Company. During that time, he advised leading companies in the fields of medical device technology, travel and hospitality, telecommunications, and energy on issues of strategy, organization, technology and operations.
Professor Chan currently holds editorial roles in several academic journals, including Operations Research, Management Science, and M&SOM. He has served in a variety of leadership and service roles at INFORMS and CORS, including as President of the INFORMS Health Application Society. He has over 140 publications in refereed journals and is co-author of an upcoming book entitled “Markov Decision Processes and Reinforcement Learning.” He has supervised over 50 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and takes great pride in cultivating a healthy, inclusive, and productive lab environment.
Professor Chan has received numerous awards and honours for his research, teaching, and service. Recent highlights include the CORS Practice Prize in 2025, the President’s Teaching Award from the University of Toronto in 2024, 1st place in the research paper competition at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2024, the INFORMS Prize for Teaching OR/MS Practice in 2023, the Pierskalla Best Paper Award from INFORMS Health Applications Society in 2023, 1st place in the INFORMS Case Competition in 2022, and the CORS Eldon Gunn Service Award in 2022. His research has been featured by the CBC, CTV News, Global News, Reuters, CNN, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Boston Globe, ESPN, Canadian Business Magazine, and World Economic Forum. |
| Date: |
| Thursday, 22 January 2026 |
| Time: |
| 10:00 am - 11:30 am |
| Venue: |
|
Institute of Data Science Innovation 4.0 I4-01-03 (Level 1 Seminar Room) 3 Research Link Singapore 117602 (Map) |
Abstract
This talk discusses several projects on optimizing the deployment of defibrillators for cardiac arrest, including placement of static defibrillators and drone delivery. Real-world impact will be presented along with a discussion of how these projects have opened new doors to other research topics.