This intimate summer solstice gathering, hosted by Mark Wiseman, Artsci’92, featured guest presentations from Dr. Salimur Choudhury, Artsci’13 on “Health Resource Optimization: AI to the Rescue?” and Dr. Christopher Cotton (Professor of Economics) on “Education as a pathway out of poverty: Fixing broken systems in Africa and America,” in New York City.
This event was an exclusive gathering, bringing together alumni from diverse backgrounds and industries for reconnecting, networking, and celebrating our alumni community.
Panelists
Chris Cotton is a Professor of Economics and the holder of the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Chair in Economic & Financial Policy at Queen’s University, where he also holds cross-appointments with the Schools of Public Policy and Medicine. Additionally, he is the Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy at Queen’s, the co-Director for NSERC’s One Society Network to build partnerships between economists, epidemiologists, and public health officials to better prepare for future crises, an Affiliated Researcher with J-PAL at MIT, and Research Director at Limestone Analytics, through which he regularly evaluates programs and policies and provides guidance for evidence-based funding and strategy for governments and NGOs around the world.
Dr. Cotton has been at Queen’s University since 2014, during which time he has supervised the research of 40 graduate students and post-docs and taught courses in Development, Public Economics, and Game Theory, as well as several courses in the Master of Public Administration program. His research regularly publishes in leading scientific journals, including the American Economic Review and Management Science, and his opinion pieces have been published by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Previously, he was on the faculty at the School of Business Administration at the University of Miami. He received his MA and PhD from Cornell University.
Dr. Salimur Choudhury leads the GOAL (Global Optimization, Analytics, and Learning) research Group. He joined Queen's University in January 2023. His primary research interest is designing algorithms for optimization problems. Manuscripts based on his research work have been published in several top-tier conferences and journals. He has received several research grants from government agencies (NSERC-DG, NSERC Alliance, MITACS Accelerate, NOHFC, NOAMA, NRCan, etc.), not-for-profit, and private industries (a few of them are based in Kingston, ON). Several solutions proposed by his research group have already been adopted by industries. Dr. Choudhury is the recipient of the Lakehead University Research Excellence Award (2021) for his research and scholarly contributions in the area of combinatorial optimization.