Sofía Pérez-Guzmán earned her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 2017 from Universidad del Valle, Colombia, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY, she received master’s degrees in transportation engineering (2020) and economics (2022). She is a current PhD candidate in transportation engineering at RPI, where her doctoral work is centered on disaster relief distribution with mobile beneficiaries and developing analytical tools for the distribution of relief goods in post-disaster scenarios. She has led many projects through the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, including one on disaster-related buying behaviors enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. She helped create RPI’s student chapter of the Women in Transportation Seminar, serving as communication chair, vice present, president, and currently as student advisor. She also is the junior vice president of programs for the Minority Issues Forum of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management of Sciences (INFORMS), helping design academic events to support the careers of minorities and underrepresented groups. Ultimately, Pérez-Guzmán's research plan involves tackling complex social problems with humanitarian logistics, food systems, and urban freight transportation by incorporating human behavior, theory validation, and technology to link theory and practice. Her educational approach will make use of applied optimization and simulation, empirical research, econometrics, and data analytics.

Research Interests

Humanitarian Logistics and Urban Freight Transportation