Elisabeth C. Paulson

Elisabeth Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the first year course on Technology and Operations Management in the required curriculum.

Professor Paulson's research is in the area of operations for social good. In particular, she designs analytical methods and algorithms for allocating scarce resources efficiently and fairly to improve social outcomes. Much of her work draws on tools from optimization, machine learning, mathematical modeling, and statistics.

Professor Paulson's research is grounded in her close collaborations with nonprofits and governmental agencies, with current emphases in the areas of immigration and food policy. Her work in food policy addresses the design and optimization of interventions for creating better access to, and consumption of, fresh food. Her work on immigration focuses on designing algorithms to support data-driven geographic assignment of refugees and asylum seekers within host countries.

Prior to joining HBS, Professor Paulson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, where she remains a Faculty Affiliate.  She received her PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2021, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Elisabeth received her B.S. in Math, B.S. in Statistics, and M.A. in Math from the Pennsylvania State University. 
For more information, please visit:
https://elisabethpaulson.github.io/