The John M. Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation

The John M. Houchens Prize honors a former registrar of the university and is awarded to the doctoral student who presents the most meritorious dissertation for the current commencement.

Joshua Nielsen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Louisville, where he also received his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering. Joshua’s research interests include applications of various technical methodologies, particularly generative AI, to public health. His dissertation is focused on numerous engineering solutions to reduce the kidney transplant supply gap by supporting living donors through the complex donation process. His mentor notes that Joshua’s dissertation addresses “extremely important and timely research questions from a novel and innovative perspective.”  His multidisciplinary work uses “the medium of kidney transplantation to show the power of Industrial Engineering principles in law enforcement, patient engagement and support, clinical efficiency, and even improvements in Generative AI.  At every stage of his research, Joshua was insistent that his work not just be a theoretical exercise, but that it be validated by domain experts as practicable and useful in their fields.  The results of his work have the potential to hugely impact society by increasing the number of legal transplants and saving thousands of lives.” 

Joshua received the Outstanding Research Accomplishments award from JB Speed School in 2024, and he presented a poster on prompt engineering for living kidney donor classification which was awarded an Honorable Mention from the INFORMS Healthcare Conference in 2023. He was also awarded the Outstanding Service Award in 2022 from the Department of Industrial Engineering.

Joshua revitalized the previously inactive INFORMS chapter, serving as its president from 2020- 2023 during which time membership grew from a stalwart group of four to a robust body of twenty-four. Joshua was voted by his peers as the resident expert in generative AI and has trained his colleagues extensively in best practices. He has been a consistent leader and educator to his peers, both formally as he led weekly peer-learning sessions in his lab, and informally through countless one-on-one interactions. He currently works as a Data Scientist at the National Center for Injury and Violence Prevention in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When AI becomes superintelligent and makes his knowledge work obsolete, Joshua hopes to learn carpentry and many other crafts.