• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2021

• Georgia Institute of Technology, Industrial and Systems Engineering, ‘23

• Host Institution: Space Capital

• Mentor: Chris Stott

• Brookie Mentor: Meera Unadkat

Madeleine Pollack is a senior Industrial and Systems Engineering (operations research) major and Mathematics minor from the Georgia Institute of Technology. While she is a native New Yorker and currently goes to school in Georgia, she proudly calls herself a Carolina girl for the 14 years she has called South Carolina home.

Madeleine learned to love both Operations Research and space from her dad. Late at night—or often very early in the morning—her dad would set up a telescope so that Madeleine, her mom, and her three sisters could look at the planets and different star clusters. A highlight of these adventures was seeing the total solar eclipse over the summer of 2018, and Madeleine looks forward to “eclipse chasing” once she has the means to travel to witness these beautiful phenomena on her own.

At Georgia Tech, Madeleine is heavily involved in undergraduate research. She is involved in two research groups: one related to optimizing mathematical frameworks for medical decision-making, and the other related to projects involving “algorithmic fairness.” In general, Madeleine is interested in pursuing topics that promote “human-centered operations research,” a branch of operations research which applies optimization models for the betterment of the human condition. Madeleine has presented her work at many conferences and competitions and has won awards like the Adobe Research Women in Technology Scholarship, the INFORMS Travel Scholarship, and several symposium presentation awards.

As a 2021 Brookie, Madeleine interned virtually with New York-based firm Space Capital where she wrote several content pieces for the team. Her final project was a three-part research piece on the state of the InsurTech market, an incredible space-enabled technology. In Fall 2021, she went on to intern with Brookie host company Hermeus as a Flight Sciences Engineering intern, where she assisted with data analytics, optimization, and simulation tasks using her extensive coding skills. Finally, in Fall 2022, Madeleine interned with Tesla as an Industrial Engineering intern.

Madeleine is now in her final semester at Georgia Tech where she is in the process of applying to PhD programs in Operations Research.