Elmira Popova

Dr. Elmira Popova graduated with MS in Mathematics from University of Sofia, Bulgaria in 1985, and PhD in Operations Research from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH in 1995. She joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate Program in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. In 2008 she was named a Fulbright Scholar and in 1999 she was given the Halliburton/Brown & Root young faculty excellence award in teaching and research. Dr. Popova specializes in stochastic processes, computational Bayesian statistics, and stochastic optimization. She is interested in reliability analysis and design of optimal maintenance strategies for randomly failing systems. Since 2004 she has collaborated with the Risk Management group at South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company on designing and developing a new risk-informed system for reliability estimation and preventive maintenance scheduling. The main objective of the Risk Informed Asset Management program is: to make optimal risk-informed decisions at both operational and executive management levels by taking into account budget, internal project dependencies, outage duration, and regulatory safety constraints; to appropriately model and include the uncertainty related to rates of return on investments, energy prices, failure mechanisms, and costs for replacement and spare parts; and to provide decision-makers quantified feedback on decision-making performance. A preliminary version of the system is currently being tested by their systems engineers and it is expected to be used in real-time production setting in Spring 2010. Dr. Popova spent two years on Wall Street where she worked on developing new high-frequency trading strategies and asset allocations models. The portfolio allocation product was used to analyze and suggest portfolio allocation for pension plans, university endowments and high net worth individuals. The size of the biggest investment brought and managed by the product was $6 billion. Dr. Popova continues to do research in quantitative finance such as statistical-arbitrage trading strategies, equity pricing calculations, and optimal asset allocation decisions. Her research has been funded by NSF, DNDO, NRC, DOE, STPNOC, EPRI, and several other industrial sponsors. Research interests:

• Stochastic modeling of systems
• Reliability modeling and estimation
• Computational statistics
• Risk management

Selected Publications

1. Damien P., Galenko A., Popova E., Hanson T., "Bayesian semiparametric analysis for a single item maintenance optimization", European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 182, (2007), pp. 794-805
2. Morton D., Popova E., Popova I, " "Efficient fund of hedge funds construction under downside risk measures", Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 30, (2006), pp. 503-518
3. Morton D. and E. Popova, "A Bayesian stochastic programming approach to an employee scheduling problem", IIE Transactions of Operations Engineering, Vol. 36, (2004), pp. 155-167
4. Chen, T-M , E. Popova, "Bayesian maintenance policies during a warranty period", Communications in Statistics: Stochastic Models, Vol. 16, (2000), 1, pp. 121-142
5. Popova E., Yu W., Kee E., Sun A., Richards D., Grantom R., "Basic factors to forecast maintenance cost and failure processes for nuclear power plants", Nuclear Engineering and Design, Vol. 236, (2006), pp. 1641-1647