“I used to associate academia with fundamental research, which I don’t enjoy much,” he says. “But slowly, I discovered another type of research, where people use rigorous scientific principles for applied and impactful projects.”A fascination with projects that have direct applications to organizational problems led Pauphilet to the field of operations research and analytics — and to a PhD at the Operations Research Center (ORC), a joint program between the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT Sloan School of Management.Operations research models decision-making processes as mathematical optimization problems, such as planning for energy production given unpredictable fluctuations in demand. It’s a complex subject that Pauphilet finds exhilarating. “Operations in practice are very messy, but I think that’s what makes them exciting. You’re never short on problems to solve,” he says.
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