UMass INFORMS Speaker Series: "Does Transportation Mean Transplantation? Impact of New Airline Routes on Sharing of Cadaveric Kidneys" by Dr. Dai

Every year, nearly 5,000 patients die while waiting for kidney transplants, and yet an estimated 3,500 procured kidneys are discarded. Although numerous policy initiatives are aimed at broadening organ pooling, they rarely account for a key friction—efficient airline transportation, ideally direct flights, is necessary for long-distance sharing, because of the time-sensitive nature of kidney transplantation. In this talk, Dr. Dai presents the effect of introducing new airline routes on broader kidney sharing. His work merges the U.S. airline transportation and kidney transplantation data sets, to create a unique sample tracking (1) the evolution of airline routes connecting all the U.S. airports and (2) kidney transplants between donors and recipients connected by these airports.

Dr. Tinglong Dai is a Professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University. He serves on the leadership team of the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and the executive committee of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. As a leading expert in healthcare analytics, Dr. Dai has been quoted hundreds of times in the media, including the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, New York Times, NPR, PBS, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. In 2021, Poets & Quants named him one of the World's Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors.