Pinar Karaca-Mandic Named TRUST Forum Award Winner

For her work on the COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, Professor Pinar Karaca-Mandic has been named a 2021 TRUST Forum award winner.

The TRUST annually recognizes women and companies in health care who boldly transform the industry in remarkable ways.

“This award belongs to the team and all in the Carlson School community,” says Karaca-Mandic, the C. Arthur Williams Jr. Professor in Healthcare Risk Management and director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI). “Our project was founded with no end date, just a shared commitment and passion of our entire team. That includes undergraduate research assistants who methodologically hand-collect data from state department of health websites every day since mid-March of 2020, countless volunteer hours from graduate students, school leaders, MILI staff, Carlson School IT and communications teams. The amount of work that has been going into it from everyone involved is just beyond words.”

Karaca-Mandic co-leads the project with Associate Professor Soumya Sen and Dr. Archelle Georgiou, a MILI Executive in Residence. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers collect, track, and publicly report daily COVID-19 hospitalizations from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The project is a collaborative effort between the two centers within the Carlson School: MILI and the Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC), which Sen leads. 

The data from the project has uncovered important insights that can help states and hospitals better manage infection rates and patient caseloads.

For its work, the project has received numerous awards and recognitions, including being named 2021 Innovations that Inspire award winner by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), winning two Silver Stevie Awards at the 2021 American Business Awards, and being named a finalist at the NIHCM Digital Media Awards. It has also been mentioned in thousands of articles across hundreds of media outlets in the past year, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Karaca-Mandic and the rest of the recipients will be recognized September 14 at the 2021 TRUST Forum Awards Celebration as well as at the annual TRUST Forum on September 28.