This Symposium focuses on fostering collaboration between researchers, community partners, and organizations to address food access and nutritional health challenges. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of community needs, explore innovative research approaches, network with community partners and researchers, and co-design impactful, research-driven solutions for sustainable societal change.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lauren Davis is a professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Her research emphasizes decision-making under uncertainty through methods such as stochastic optimization and simulation. She applies these tools to enhance supply chain decisions across both commercial and humanitarian contexts. Notably, her work on hunger relief supply chains has appeared in CNN’s Great Big Story and the National Science Foundation’s Discovery series. She currently leads an NSF-funded National Research Traineeship project that applies computational data science to food security and hunger relief.