Emily Garcia earned her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research in 2020 at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently is a fourth-year PhD student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in industrial engineering at Purdue University. She is focused on optimizing health interventions in the form of computer decision-making support systems (CDSS) that identify acute care patients for early discharge to reduce health disparities common among older adults. In the next five years, she aims to further investigate how CDSS can be better integrated to balance the needs of patients and caregivers. At Purdue, she founded and established the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers graduate chapter, in which she secured funds to fully fund eight graduate students’ attendance at the national convention. In 2022-23, she was the College of Engineering’s sole graduate student mentoring fellow, developing and facilitating a DEI seminar series, the results of which are being presented and published by the American Society for Engineering Education. For Garcia, a first-generation Latina scholar, effective teaching means kindling curiosity, triggering critical thinking, and engaging students’ natural creativity. As a professor, she will strive to expand recruitment and retention of URMs, and her courses will highlight recent trends in technology and foster early research ideas.

Research Interests

Healthcare Decision-Support Systems Optimization