Faculty
CREATE fellows are researchers whose scholarship has contributed to the understanding of risk, behavioral, economic and decision analysis of threats and emergencies that jeopardize lives and livelihood, or jeopardize the environment. Fellows conduct research on threats that are malevolent in origin (e.g., terrorism), as well as unintentional accidents and naturally occurring disasters.
For information on the CREATE Fellows program, click here.
Director and Senior Research Fellow
Randolph Hall
Dr. Randolph Hall is Dean’s Professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Director of CREATE. As VP of Research for 14 1/2 years, Hall led research for all of USC, overseeing research advancement, administration, and research ethics. His current research focuses on how universities innovate in their practices for education, research, and clinical care, and how they overcome obstacles to change, as well as supply chain resilience and control of infectious disease. Other research experience includes founder/principal investigator for two national research centers: CREATE and the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research (METRANS). As chair of ISE, Hall led Industrial and Systems Engineering to become the first named academic department at the University of Southern California, rising to a top-15 department nationally, propelled by a major endowment gift from USC Viterbi alum and USC Trustee Daniel Epstein.
Director Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow
Adam Rose
Dr. Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy and a Senior Research Fellow at CREATE. He is also a Senior Fellow of USC’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and a Fellow of USC’s Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. Previously, he held faculty and department chair positions in applied economics departments at The Pennsylvania State University and West Virginia University, as well as a faculty position in economics at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University, but has worked on interdisciplinary topics throughout most of his career.
Director Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow
Detlof von Winterfeldt
Dr. Detlof von Winterfeldt is a Professor at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Viterbi School of Engineering and a Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Price School of Public Policy at USC, and a Senior Research Fellow at CREATE. In 2004, he co-founded CREATE, the first university-based Center of Excellence funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.
Associate Director for Transition
Isaac Maya
Dr. Isaac Maya, PhD, PE (Nuclear), has over 25 years experience in executive management, strategic planning, and high technology academic and industrial research and development. This includes practical experience in program and project management, product development and commercialization and fiscal responsibility, in both industrial/commercial and academic environments. Dr. Maya has specialized in interdisciplinary research for the government, military and commercial sectors, ranging in scope from information technologies and systems to nuclear power reactor systems to start-up business management and operations.
Senior Research Fellows
Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science
Wändi Bruine de Bruin
Dr. Wändi Bruine de Bruin is a Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science. Across USC, she holds affiliations with the Sol Price School of Public Policy, the Department of Psychology, the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, the Center for Economic and Social Research, and the Center for Sustainability Solutions. She is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:Applied, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Decision, Medical Decision Making, the Journal of Risk Research, and Psychology and Aging.
Dean's Professor and Department Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Maged Dessouky
Maged M. Dessouky, Ph.D., is Dean’s Professor and Chair in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Dr. Dessouky’s research focuses on developing simulation and optimization models in improving the efficiency of large-scale complex systems, and in particular supply chain and global logistics networks. His simulation models have been used for capacity analysis of the Southern California rail network. He has developed location and routing models for the distribution of medical supplies in the event of a large-scale emergency. Dr. Dessouky was recipient of the 2007 Transportation Science & Logistics Best Paper Prize for the paper “Optimal Slack Time for Schedule-Based Transit Operations” published in Transportation Science and is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IIE).
CREATE Director and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Randolph Hall
Dr. Randolph Hall is a Professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Randy’s current research focuses on how universities innovate in their practices for education, research, and clinical care, and how they overcome obstacles to change. Other research experience includes founder/principal investigator for two national research centers: CREATE and the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research (METRANS). As chair of ISE, Hall led Industrial and Systems Engineering to become the first named academic department at the University of Southern California, having risen to a top-15 department nationally, propelled by a major endowment gift from USC Viterbi alum and USC Trustee Daniel Epstein.
Professor of Psychology
Richard John
Dr. Richard John serves as a Senior Research Fellow at CREATE, professor in the Department of Psychology at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at USC and as a Research Fellow at CREATE. His research focuses on normative and descriptive models of human judgment and decision making and methodological issues in application of decision and probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). He has consulted on a number of large projects involving expert elicitation, including analysis of nuclear power plant risks (NUREG 1150) and analysis of cost and schedule risk for tritium supply alternatives.
Provost Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences
Matthew Kahn
Dr. Matthew E. Kahn is a Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA. He has taught at Columbia, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, UCLA , and Johns Hopkins University and has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Stanford and the National University of Singapore. He is a graduate of Hamilton College and the London School of Economics and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
Research Professor
Adam Rose
Dr. Adam Rose is a Research Professor in the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy and a Senior Research Fellow at CREATE. Previously, he held faculty and department chair positions in applied economics departments at The Pennsylvania State University and West Virginia University, as well as a faculty positon in economics at the University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University, but has worked on interdisciplinary topics throughout most of his career.
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lucio Soibelman
Dr. Lucio Soibelman is the Fred Champion Estate Chair in Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He worked as a construction manager for 10 years before moving to the U.S., where he obtained his Ph.D. in civil engineering systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1998.
During the last 25 years, his research has focused on advanced data acquisition, management, visualization, and mining for construction and operations of advanced infrastructure systems.
Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Professor of Public Policy and Management
Detlof von Winterfeldt
Dr. Detlof von Winterfeldt is a Professor at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the Viterbi School of Engineering and a Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Price School of Public Policy at USC, and a Senior Research Fellow at CREATE. In 2004, he co-founded CREATE, the first university-based Center of Excellence funded by the US Department of Homeland Security.
Research Fellows
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ketan Savla
Ketan Savla, Ph.D., is the John and Dorothy Shea Early Career Chair in Civil Engineering and an associate professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at USC. He is also a co-founder and the chief science advisor of Xtelligent, Inc., a smart urban mobility startup. Dr. Savla’s research focuses on characterizing fundamental limits on efficiency and resilience of large-scale societal systems due to physical and behavioral constraints of its constituents, and in leveraging technological and algorithmic advancements to overcome these limitations. In particular, he has developed algorithms to control the routing of flow in transportation and energy networks using real-time information to withstand maximal disruption.
Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Practice of Economics
Terrie Walmsley
Terrie Walmsley is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Practice of Economics in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the Chief Economist at ImpactECON LLC, a firm that provides global economic analysis to government and non-governmental organizations around the world. Dr. Walmsley received her Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia in 1999. After a short post-doc at Purdue University, she became a lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom in 2000, where she began her research into the impacts of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). During this time, she also began work with Sussex University Professor Alan Winters to examine the impact of the temporary movement of natural persons (mode 4) for the Commonwealth Secretariat; later developing the first bilateral global migration database for the UK’s Department for International Development and the World Bank.
For information on CREATE External Research Fellows click here