Li awarded Best Dissertation Paper Prize

Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering Max Z. Li did not come home empty-handed from his most recent conference, winning the Aviation Application Best Dissertation Paper Prize at the INFORMS Annual Meeting this week. 

Li’s research focuses on safer, efficient, more resilient, and equity-oriented air transportation systems. He leads the Laboratory for Air Transportation, Infrastructure, and Connected Environments (LATTICE) at U-M. Completing his PhD at MIT before joining Michigan Aerospace earlier this year, Li’s dissertation focused on new metrics and action strategies to mitigate the impacts of large scale disruptions to air transportation systems. 

“From natural disasters to power outages, these events, even geographically-localized ones, often result in widespread disruptions across the air transportation network. In order to engineer resilience and design better proactive mitigation strategies, it is important to identify, characterize, and control the effects of such disruptions. A more resilient and well-prepared air transportation system directly translates to mitigated delay costs and increased service quality. In this thesis, we explore new metrics to quantify/identify disruptions, and develop innovative strategies to prescribe actions to mitigate its impacts and hasten network recovery,” explains Li.

Li recently won two best paper awards for Network Management and UAS/UAM/AAM at the International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT 2022), a joint FAA-Eurocontrol sponsored biennial conference.