Contact Details:

✉ ahajjar@mbsc.edu.sa

✆ +966 12 510 6142

Profile

Dr. Ali Hajjar joined Mohammed bin Salman College of Business and Entrepreneurship (MBSC) in July 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Management Science.

Dr. Hajjar’s research involves the use of statistical and mathematical models to inform health policy decisions. Particularly, his research interests are centered on the intersection of operations research & statistics, with a focus on stochastic optimization and simulation to support decision-making in practice. His primary methodological and computational research interest is completely and partially observable Markov decision processes (MDPs). His research interests also include personalized medicine, healthcare analytics, health economics, and advancements of decision-analytic methods for medical decision-making.

Prior to joining MBSC, Dr. Hajjar joined Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) in August 2020 as a Research Fellow within the Radiology Department, working on research projects related to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), alcoholic liver disease (ALD), and screening for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC). His work received the “Best of The Liver Meeting” Award in the Health Services and Public Health Research category at the Liver Meeting 2021 conference by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) (Anaheim, CA 2021).

His current research focuses on healthcare applications at the population and patient levels. He has substantive research experience in various diseases and collaborated with several medical practitioners to solve complex healthcare engineering problems, including the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET), whose studies received major media attention from Time, NBC, The New York Times, CNN, ABC News, Los Angeles Times, CBS, and others.

Dr. Hajjar received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia. During his graduate studies, a National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute (NIH/NCI) grant proposal about his work received the top score by CISNET’s Breast Working Group (BWG) and funded by NCI for a budget of $9,152,630.

Selected Publications

• Hajjar, A., & Alagoz, O. (2023). Personalized disease screening decisions considering a chronic condition. Management Science, 69(1), 260-282.
• Ergun, M. A., Hajjar, A., Alagoz, O., & Rampurwala, M. (2022). Optimal breast cancer risk reduction policies tailored to personal risk level. Health Care Management Science, 25(3), 363-388.
• Chhatwal, J., Hajjar, A., Mueller, P. P., Nemutlu, G., Kulkarni, N., Peters, M. L. B., & Kanwal, F. (2023). Hepatocellular Carcinoma Incidence Threshold for Surveillance in Virologically Cured Hepatitis C Individuals. Clinical gastroenterology and hepatology.
• Lu, Y., Hajjar, A., Cryns, V. L., Trentham‐Dietz, A., Gangnon, R. E., Heckman‐Stoddard, B. M., & Alagoz, O. (2023). Breast cancer risk for women with diabetes and the impact of metformin: A meta‐analysis. Cancer Medicine, 12(10), 11703-11718.