Dr. Laurie Garrow, assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), recently received the distinguished CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her proposal entitled "Identification and Integration of Persistent Behavioral Biases in Online Search and Purchase". This multidisciplinary award was jointly funded by two NSF programs, Decision, Risk, and Management Science (DRMS) and Service Enterprise Systems (SES), in the amount of $400,000.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their respective organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Dr. Garrow's research will model airline customers' searching and purchasing behaviors and investigate how prices evolve in markets under different market conditions. One of the primary goals of her research is to gain a better understanding of repeat customer purchasing decisions and determine how these decisions are affected by menu designs, display options, and competitor prices. A second primary goal of her research is to quantify the importance of incorporating disaggregate customer decision-making into traditional airline revenue management and scheduling models. The results of this research will provide new insights into the benefits of integrating both short-term and long-term customer behavior into industry demand forecasting models.
Dr. Garrow earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University. Her dissertation won first prize in the Aviation Applications Section of Institute for the Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and honorable mention in the Eric Pas dissertation competition sponsored by the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR). She is the 2009 recipient of the national CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Member Award and Georgia Tech's CETL-BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award. Dr. Garrow has five years of industry experience, including four years as an analyst in the Research and Development Revenue Management Group of United Airlines and one year as an analyst in the Customer Science Unit of Mercer Management Consulting.