Bio

Professor Amy Ellen Mainville Cohn is an Alfred F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she also holds an appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health. Dr. Cohn is the Associate Director of the University of Michigan Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS) and serves on the Institute Leadership Team of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI).

Dr. Cohn joined the faculty at the University of Michigan College of Engineering as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering in 2002. She was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2009 and in 2011 she was named a Thurnau Professor as well as being appointed as the Associate Director of CHEPS. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2017.

Her primary research interests are in applications of combinatorial optimization, particularly to healthcare and aviation, and to the challenges of optimization problems with multiple objective criteria. Her primary teaching interest is in combinatorial optimization techniques, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She currently teaches the undergraduate introduction to optimization course as well as a graduate seminar course in healthcare engineering and patient safety.

She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 and earned the A.B. in Applied Mathematics, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in June, 1991.


She is married to Jonathan Cohn, a senior national correspondent at the Huffington Post and author of “SICK: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis – And the People Who Pay the Price.” She has two sons, Tommy (an undergrad at UM in math and computer science and member of the Michigan Marching Band drumline) and Peter (with interests in baking and architecture). They reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan and enjoy vacationing in Boston and on Cape Cod.