Cassandra Thiel
Assistant Professor of Public Service, NYU Wagner; NYU Langone Health; NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Dr. Cassandra Thiel is an Assistant Professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service with a joint appointments at the NYU Langone Health School of Medicine in the Department of Population Health and the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Civil and Urban Engineering.
Her research utilizes life cycle assessment (LCA) and principles of industrial ecology to analyze and improve the environmental performance of medical systems, hospital design, healthcare practice, and medical technologies.
As a 2014-2015 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellow, Dr. Thiel calculated the environmental footprint of cataract surgery at Aravind Eye Care System in southern India, finding that Aravind’s carbon footprint for phacoemulsification was 5% of the same surgery done in the United Kingdom. Cassandra has since worked with ophthalmologists at NYU Langone Health and through the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) to establish tools for baseline LCAs of global cataract surgeries and to measure the cost and environmental footprint of unused pharmaceuticals wasted during phacoemulsification in the US. Cassandra works in multiple specialty areas, including inpatient departments, radiology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, and obstetrics/gynecology to provide data-driven solutions for greening medical practice and policies.
She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and BS from Michigan Technological University, both in Civil Engineering. Her graduate training was supported by the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation and an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) where she also worked on green building design and construction.
This 7-week short course provides a general introduction to environmental sustainability and touches on the science, concepts, and strategies used to “green” businesses, organizations, and individuals’ lifestyles. Modern consumers are demanding sustainability from organizations where they utilize or buy goods and services and in which they invest. Modern management and policy leaders, then, need to know what environmental sustainability is and which tools are available to improve the footprint of their organizations and businesses.
Operations management specifically involves the analysis, design, operation, and improvement of the systems and processes that deliver goods or services and ultimately outputs and outcomes. It is required to achieve the organization’s mission, provide value to the organization’s many stakeholders, and effectively translate policy into action. As such, operations management plays an important part of being an effective manager and policy implementer. In this course, we will develop a lens to perceive processes and systems in a variety of contexts along with an analytical toolbox to examine and understand these. Students will learn how to build basic operations models in Excel to make effective, evidence-based managerial, design, and policy decisions as well as gain defined analytical skills that lend themselves to roles in operations, management, hospital management, policy implementation, human services, consulting, and much more.
Operations management specifically involves the analysis, design, operation, and improvement of the systems and processes that deliver goods or services and ultimately outputs and outcomes. It is required to achieve the organization’s mission, provide value to the organization’s many stakeholders, and effectively translate policy into action. As such, operations management plays an important part of being an effective manager and policy implementer. In this course, we will develop a lens to perceive processes and systems in a variety of contexts along with an analytical toolbox to examine and understand these. Students will learn how to build basic operations models in Excel to make effective, evidence-based managerial, design, and policy decisions as well as gain defined analytical skills that lend themselves to roles in operations, management, hospital management, policy implementation, human services, consulting, and much more.