Post by Princeton University

In August 2025, Botswana’s government declared a public health emergency due to widespread medicine and equipment shortage across the country. Elliot Lee ‘26, an Operations Research & Financial Engineering Department, Princeton University major with minors in global health and health policy, applied and computational mathematics, quantitative economics and bioengineering, was driven to help. “I am drawn to the intersection of optimization and global health, and wanted to work on a problem where technical methods could have a tangible real-world impact.” Elliot, from Great Falls, VA, combined fieldwork with technical research, traveling to Botswana to meet with stakeholders from the Ministry of Health, the Central Medical Stores, and the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships. “I was conscious of the pitfalls of parachute research, so building sustained partnerships with local stakeholders in Botswana, rather than imposing solutions from the outside, was central to how I approached the work from the beginning.” His research was supported by the Health Scholars program at Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing (CHW). "Those site visits and conversations directly shaped the design of the model and grounded the work in the real operational challenges facing Botswana's pharmaceutical supply chain," said Elliot. Under the direction of his advisor professor Bartolomeo Stellato, Elliot’s senior thesis used predictive modeling to optimize Botswana’s supply chain mechanism on how medicines should be procured, stored, and distributed across 619 health facilities. Next year, Elliot, a certified EMT, will be a pre-doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley studying health economics, with hopes of attending medical school in the near future to become a dual orthopedic surgeon-statistician, working on machine learning projects to improve patient care and global health.