This article is the fifth in our series, “Women in Optimization.” Although these articles will highlight women, we hope the stories will encourage all individuals who might want to pursue a career in optimization.
Dr. Natalia Summerville was supposed to be a professional violinist.
Born into a family of classical musicians in Moscow, she started playing the violin at age five. Her parents were musicians. Their friends were musicians. She attended a music school.
But a move to Mexico at age 10 changed her trajectory. Enrolling in “regular” school for the first time, she discovered that her true love was math.
“It was relaxing for me,” she says. “Doing derivatives…the fact that there are absolute rights and wrongs…I just loved that.”
Dr. Summerville’s love for math is grounded in the real world. When she enrolled in the Tecnológico de Monterrey, rather than pursuing a “pure” math degree, she chose something more practical. She explains, “I ended up choosing industrial engineering because practical math is one of the focuses of this degree, along with other methods to solve problems in industry. And it was the absolute right choice for me.”
She loved it so much, she stayed at the Tecnológico, earning a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering, a Master of Science in quality and productivity, and a PhD in industrial engineering. She rounded out her academic training with a second PhD in operations research at North Carolina State University, where she wrote her thesis on project scheduling.
A Passion for Teaching & Industry
While at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Dr. Summerville served as the director of the industrial engineering undergraduate program, which confirmed her love for teaching. “I deeply enjoyed that,” she explains. “The interactions and engagement with students give me a lot of energy”
She carried this passion to the United States, teaching at North Carolina State, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now Duke University. She thought she might become a career professor.
In her final year at NC State, however, she took a job at SAS. She was a full-time PhD student and full-time analytics consultant. “It was very intense,” she recalls. “I never recommend that to my students.”
But in spite of the rigorous schedule, the decision was fortuitous. Working at SAS reconnected Dr. Summerville to the practical side of optimization and led her to pivot once more. She dove into time series and price elasticity models and saw the impact when clients followed her recommendations.
“I enjoy applying math and forecasting and seeing real-world results,” she says. “Learning more about academic paths in American universities, I realized I prefer the practical aspects and teaching, much like my experience at SAS.”
She stayed at SAS for 11 years, eventually becoming a senior manager at the Advanced Analytics Center of Excellence. SAS’s diverse client base allowed her to work across many industries (healthcare, life sciences, retail, transportation, and manufacturing) while doing what she loved: optimization for practical application and impact. “SAS was a wonderful place to work for many reasons,” she says.
SAS also gave her the flexibility to continue teaching at Duke University, where she developed and leads a course titled Optimization in Practice. She describes the class as being focused on the prescriptive analytics and AI workflow: translating business problems into mathematical models, applying existing state-of-the-art optimization algorithms, and then converting results into actionable, prescriptive recommendations for business stakeholders. The emphasis is on delivering measurable organizational impact—an aspect she considers the most rewarding part of her work.
A Pivot to Healthcare
Dr. Summerville enjoyed her work at SAS, but started to feel more interested in working in healthcare. In 2022, she learned about an opportunity at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center.
As MSK’s Director of Decision Intelligence, she manages a portfolio of AI and decision intelligence (DI) models that support hospital operations, from initial scoping to workflow integration and adoption. Dr. Summerville states, “It’s rewarding when our recommendations become part of real clinical and operational workflows.”
A recent scheduling project reminded her of her thesis days. Radiation oncology plans are complex and customized for each patient. Plan requests arrive continuously, requiring focus from specific planners, and each plan may take several days to complete. While there are numerous ways to match plans with planners, they must be allocated within many constraints and balancing workload across all planners. To streamline this process, Dr. Summerville and her team developed a scheduling tool integrated into the radiation oncology platform, enabling rapid assignment and plans (workload) allocation. This approach helps ensure patients receive their optimal treatment plans promptly. After piloting the tool, they have now adopted it for active use.
When it comes to designing and deploying tools, she advises practitioners to not discard “simple tools” just because they might feel “uninteresting.”
“While some use cases will require the latest state-of-art technology, some workflows can be quickly improved with a basic LP. Again, the focus needs to be practical impact,” she says.
A Personal Mission
When Dr. Summerville had her baby, there were complications, which led her daughter to receive donor breastmilk. Eventually having to pump milk herself, Dr. Summerville understood the emotional, physical, and mental toll pumping milk takes. She was deeply moved by these women, whom she would never meet, but who donated their hard-won pumped breastmilk to feed her baby.
She connected with her local human milk bank to learn how she could support their work, and found a system full of optimization potential. “From an operations perspective, milk banks are similar to bio manufacturing facilites managing inventory, supply, demand, internal processing,” she explains. “They have supply that they don't control. They have the demand—about 80% of that milk goes to NICUs. And because of regulatory requirements, they have tons of data.”
Dr. Summerville worked with the first human milk banks on a number of optimization and data science questions, turning some of them into projects for her NCSU, Duke University, and MIT students. She’s now determined to work on scaling this work to banks across the United States as a board member for the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA).
A Simple Guide for Priorities
Between motherhood, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Duke University, and HMBANA, Dr. Summerville has many demands on her time.
So how does she make it work? Three main rules:
Have a job that ensures work-life balance. SAS and Memorial Sloan Kettering gave her that.
Family time is the top priority. When her daughter gets home, she has Dr. Summerville’s full attention until she goes to sleep. Unless there is a work emergency, that time is untouchable.
If something doesn’t energize her, she doesn't do it. Duke and HMBANA? Both give her energy because she deeply enjoys this work.
“Don’t commit to things you don’t like; don’t do things that you think are good for your career but that you don’t enjoy in your heart and find tedious,” she advises. “Because when you’re on your laptop at nine, ten in the evening, doing something that doesn’t feel good…you will feel miserable and believe you’re not capable of achiving it all, which is not true.”
So Dr. Natalia Summerville is not a professional violinist. She’s a mom. A data scientist and optimization practitioner. A teacher. A data-for-good champion. An advocate for mothers and babies. She’s a woman who uses mathematical optimization for impact.
Learn more about how Dr. Natalia Summerville drives impact by following her on LinkedIn, and stay tuned for more Women in Optimization articles later this year.
