Karen Hicklin, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. Before beginning her faculty appointment, she completed Postdoctoral Training in the Department of Statistics and Operations and Department of Health Behavior in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interest include the data-driven approaches to model decision making for healthcare quality improvement. She focuses on using optimization methods (e.g., decision trees, simulation, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and Bayesian decision analysis) to provide solutions and policies for healthcare delivery. She received her PhD in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State University, her MS in Mathematics and Statistics from Georgetown University, and her BS from Spelman College where she majored in mathematics.