Fardin Ganjkhanloo

Research

What I work on

My research develops methods in operations research and uncertainty quantification, with a focus on inferring and improving how decisions are made. I apply these tools across health care, from policy to hospital operations.

Research Themes

Inverse optimization & statistical inference

Classical optimization asks what decision is best given an objective. Inverse optimization asks the reverse: given the decisions people actually make, what objective were they pursuing? My methodological work develops inverse-optimization frameworks that recover these hidden objectives from data, and characterizes when the resulting estimates are stable, identifiable, and computationally tractable. This is foundational for any setting where we need to infer goals and preferences that are never observed directly.

Health care policy & economics

My current work builds supply-side models of the U.S. health system to understand how hospitals respond to the financial incentives set by payers. Combining microsimulation, optimization, and behavioral modeling with national Medicare data, I study how payment reforms such as bundled payments reshape care delivery, patient outcomes, and spending. The aim is to give policymakers evidence about which reforms actually improve value before they are enacted at scale.

Interpretable clinical risk assessment

Hospitals rely on risk scores to decide which patients need closer monitoring, but the most accurate models are often too opaque to trust at the bedside. During my PhD, working with a team of clinical collaborators, I developed optimization-based methods to improve the accuracy of the Johns Hopkins fall-risk assessment tool (JHFRAT) and align it more closely with fall outcomes using EHR data. We continue to work on developing systems that improve fall-risk prediction and reduce nursing burden.

Positions

Center for Health Systems & Policy ModelingHealth Care Policy Modeler
2025 — Present
Developing supply-side models of the U.S. health system with health economists and policy experts.
Center for Systems Science & EngineeringPh.D. Researcher
2019 — 2025
PhD research in operations research for healthcare, advised by Kimia Ghobadi. Part of the team behind the globally used Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard.

Honors & Awards

Excellence in Research Award Finalist

JHU Dept. of Medicine & Whiting School of Engineering Research Retreat — 2024

Academic Service

Session Chair, INFORMS Healthcare Conference 2026

“Impact of Financial and Insurance Systems on Healthcare” — July 2026

President & Former Vice President, JHU INFORMS Student Chapter

2022 — 2025

Session Co-organizer, POMS 33rd Annual Conference

Orlando, FL — May 2023

Reviewer

npj Digital Medicine · IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering · HICSS · PCI Mathematical & Computational Biology