Focus on new faculty: Boutilier bolsters global health through optimization - College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison

Justin Boutilier uses optimization and machine learning to improve healthcare access, delivery and quality, particularly in low- and middle-income settings. As a second-year PhD student at the University of Toronto, Justin Boutilier spent four weeks in Dhaka, Bangladesh, investigating ways to curb ambulance response times in the bustling capital of a developing country. He quickly got a firsthand look at the scope of the challenge: The roughly 10-mile trip from his hotel to meetings in the city took about three hours. "You could walk faster," he says, "but there's no sidewalk, so it's kind of dangerous." Boutilier, who has joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor, uses optimization and machine learning to improve healthcare access, delivery and quality, particularly in low- and middle-income settings.