2026 Douglas C. Montgomery Distinguished Lecture Series
with Dr. Yuehwern Yih
Date: Friday, April 17, 2026
Time: 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
(45-minute lecture, 15-minute Q+A)
Location: Paul C. Helmick Center (HLMK), Room 351
Reception to follow from 4:30p-6:30p at FOCH Cafe Bistro.
New technologies promise to transform health care and humanitarian assistance. But real-world conditions often complicate those ambitions. This talk explores why data, automation and digital tools don’t always translate smoothly into effective action on the ground. Using real examples and case studies, Dr. Yuehwern Yih will show how human judgment, local context and environmental uncertainty shape outcomes, and why designing technology with people and place in mind is essential for creating solutions that actually work.
About the lecture
IE for health and humanitarian aid
Technological advances in digital platforms, automation, and sensor systems are rapidly expanding capabilities in healthcare delivery and humanitarian assistance. However, in complex operating environments, the integration of these technologies often reveals a critical gap between cyber systems and the physical realities of human action, environmental variability, and contextual constraints. This misalignment can undermine decision quality and service reliability, and in some cases, lead to unintended or suboptimal outcomes.
This talk examines these challenges in last-mile delivery for healthcare and humanitarian assistance, where decision-making is shaped by the dynamic interplay of human judgment, technological capabilities, and on-the-ground realities. Drawing on case studies, it will discuss how discrepancies between data collected for one operational purpose and its subsequent use for modeling or strategic decision-making can propagate through the system — amplifying risks and degrading performance. Emphasis will be placed on the importance of context-aware design, stakeholder engagement, and research translation to deliver high-quality, sustainable solutions.
About Dr. Yuehwern Yih
Yuehwern Yih is a Taiwanese-American industrial engineer and control theorist.
She is the Tompkins Professor in the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, where she directs the Smart Operations and Systems Laboratory and the LASER PULSE Consortium. Her research interests include the design, modeling, and control of dynamic and complex systems, with applications including industrial and humanitarian supply chains, healthcare, and food distribution. Yih was a 1998 recipient of the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award of SME. She was the 2024 recipient of the IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award, the first woman to receive the award.
She became a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (now the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers) in 2009. She was named to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025, “for contributions to supply chain management systems in humanitarian relief efforts and health care”.
About the series
The Douglas C. Montgomery Distinguished Lecture Series is designed to periodically offer talks to raise the overall profile of industrial engineering and provide a forum for top experts to tackle the field’s growing opportunities and challenges.
Read about the 2023 lecture with Dr. Harriet B. Nembhard
Read about the 2024 lecture with Dr. G. Don Taylor
Read about the 2025 lecture with Dr. Pascal Van Hentenryck
About Douglas C. Montgomery
Douglas C. Montgomery is a Regents Professor of Industrial Engineering and Statistics at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering. His research interests are in industrial statistics. He is an author of 16 books and more than 200 technical papers. He is a recipient of the Shewhart Medal, the Brumbaugh Award, the Hunter Award, the Shewell Award and the Ellis R. Ott Award. Montgomery is also a recipient of the George Box Medal from the European Network For Business and Industrial Statistics, or ENBIS.
Montgomery is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Society for Quality Control, the Royal Statistical Society, the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.