Dr Marion Penn

Following my BSc. in Mathematics at Bristol University, I worked as a PCT Information Analyst and then as a maths teacher, before taking a MSc. in OR at the University of Southampton.

My MSc. Dissertation applied System Dynamics to project demand for social services locally and consider possible interventions to manage local challenges and I received an Award for Excellence for this work.

My PhD., also at Southampton University, explored various aspects of hospital operating theatre scheduling. This included applying multi-objective mixed integer programming to the development of master theatre timetables and using Discrete Event Simulation to compare the effects of using a wide range of booking algorithms for the scheduling of individual operations.

After a couple of years as a Teaching Fellow in OR I am enjoying a returning to applied health care problems in the CLAHRC. Her research interests are applying simulation and linear/integer programming and qualitative OR methods such as cognitive mapping and influence diagrams, in healthcare. I am particularly interested in projects combining mixtures of these methods to the same problem and the additional insight that this generates.