CORPP, the Collaborative Operations Research for People and Planet, is led by Esther Jose, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University.

We develop operations-research, optimization, and data-driven decision tools for wildfire resilience, agricultural monitoring, and information collection under uncertainty.

Research areas
• Wildfire risk reduction and community-informed prescribed-fire planning
• Agricultural decision support and soil-moisture estimation
• Network optimization, routing, and information collection under uncertainty

Funded research
• NSF FIRE-WUI: RECAP—A Robust, Efficient, and Community-Guided Framework for Smoke-Aware Prescribed Fire Planning in the Wildland–Urban Interface. 

I am not recruiting new graduate students until Spring 2028 at the earliest.

• Kriging-Informed Coverage Sampling: An Integer Programming Approach to Optimizing Information Collection. Geographical Analysis, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.70044

• From satellite pixels to township boundaries: A study on soil moisture estimation for Iowa farms. IISE Annual Conference & Expo, 2026.

• Scheduling and routing with degradation-triggered job arrivals: An application to forest firefighting with an unmanned aerial vehicle fleet. European Journal of Operational Research 330(3), 715–732, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18140

May 2026 — Kriging-Informed Coverage Sampling was published in Geographical Analysis.