Esra Buyuktahtakin Toy
1145 Perry Street
Blacksburg, VA 24061
I am looking for highly motivated prospective Ph.D. students with a strong background in optimization and machine learning (ML) and who have an interest in contributing to cutting-edge research at the intersection of ML/AI, operations research, game theory, supply chain & logistics, healthcare, and environment & sustainability. Interested candidates should apply to the ISE Ph.D. program at Virginia Tech as soon as possible and are also strongly encouraged to contact Dr. Esra Buyuktahtakin Toy at esratoy@vt.edu with a CV and other application materials. See the related Graduate Assistantship position announcement here.
Research Areas
Main Area: Operations Research, Integrated Optimization and Machine Learning, Decision Making under Uncertainty
- Methodology: Risk-averse Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programming, Combinatorial Optimization, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Algorithms
- Applications: Emerging Applications in Healthcare, Epidemiological, Forestry and Agricultural Systems and Supply Chain & Logistics: tackling infectious diseases that ravage the human body, such as the COVID-19, Ebola virus disease, and the HIV, and invasive species outbreaks that create havoc on forests and agriculture, such as the emerald ash borer (EAB) and Sericea Lespedeza in North America
- Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, 2009
- M.S. in Management Science, Lehigh University, 2007
- M.S. in Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University, 2005
Dr. Esra Büyüktahtakιn Toy is an Associate Professor in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. She worked at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Wichita State University (WSU), and the University of Arizona (UA) before joining Virginia Tech. Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy’s research focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in multi-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization with a mix of theory and algorithms. Her recent research investigates deep machine learning and supervised learning algorithms to predict optimal solutions to mixed-integer programs. Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy is a national leader in epidemic disease modeling and logistics optimization to tackle epidemic diseases in healthcare, agriculture, and forestry. Examples of applications include infectious diseases that ravage the human body, such as COVID-19, Ebola virus disease (EVD), and HIV, and invasive species that create havoc on forests, such as the emerald ash borer (EAB) in North America and Canada, Sericea Lespedeza damaging agricultural products in the Great Plains, Zebra Mussels harming native species in Great Lakes, and flammable buffelgrass in the Sonoran Desert. Dr. Büyüktahtakιn Toy is the recipient of the 2016 NSF CAREER Award. She has also been awarded various projects by NSF, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research with a total funding of $2.5M. She has published her research in 41 flagship journals in Operations Research. She has taken leadership roles in INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) and is the associate editor for the Springer Nature Operations Research Forum journal.