Cal Poly Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering students Daniel Hopkins, Elliot Overhiser and Liam Mahony won first place in the 2025-26 IISE Operations Research Division Undergraduate Case Study Hackathon. The team presented its work at the IISE 2026 Annual Conference & Expo in Arlington, Texas, the flagship international conference for industrial engineering.
The Cal Poly team was advised by Byeongmok Kim, an assistant professor in the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department and a faculty affiliate of the Noyce School of Applied Computing. The students applied operations research methods to address one of the nation’s growing health care challenges: long-term nursing home staffing and scheduling.
The hackathon asked undergraduate teams to prototype an algorithmic framework for intelligent long-term nursing home staffing and scheduling decision support. Teams were expected to formulate mathematical optimization models and design solution algorithms for U.S. nursing home administrators facing rising demand, workforce shortages, regulatory requirements and cost pressures.
Ten teams participated in the competition, and four finalist teams were selected, including teams from Cal Poly, Texas A&M University and Tsinghua University. As one of the four finalist teams, Hopkins, Overhiser and Mahony presented their work at the IISE 2026 Annual Conference & Expo on May 17.
The first-place finish reflects Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy and the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department’s commitment to preparing students to solve complex, real-world problems. By applying optimization, analytics and algorithmic decision-making to healthcare workforce planning, Hopkins, Overhiser and Mahony demonstrated how industrial engineering methods can contribute to more efficient operations and better service delivery in long-term care settings.
