Paula Penagos, a PhD student in the Supply Chain Analytics program, took home first place in the 2025 Public Sector Operations Research Best Video competition at the INFORMS conference held in Atlanta earlier this fall. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)
In her time as a PhD student in the Supply Chain Analytics program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Paula Penagos has consistently proven herself to be not only a world-class supply chain researcher but also an expert in finding ways to best convey the results of her work based on her intended audience.
“With academia, you need to justify why the research is valuable to the knowledge in general,” she said. “How am I contributing? But when I’m trying to grab the attention from someone in policy making or in the public sector in general, I need to show them how I am contributing to how they make decisions. How can I light the path for them to think of problems in a different way?”
When Penagos entered the 2025 Public Sector Operations Research Best Video competition at the INFORMS conference held in Atlanta, she was pushing her own boundaries. She had a deep understanding of her research subject matter – the dangers of flash floods, and how people react to emergency messaging – but she had never put together a video presentation quite like the one required to enter the competition. She approached the challenge with the same enthusiasm and work ethic that has become a hallmark of hers in UMSL’s supply chain program.
It’s obvious from the opening line of her 5-minute video, titled “Sheltering under the storm,” that Penagos also understands how to grab the audience’s attention, quickly.
“It is just rain,” she says in the voiceover, as windshield wipers struggle to sweep water away from the driver’s view, “until it’s not.”
Penagos’ video was named as one of three finalists for the competition ahead of the conference in Atlanta, along with supply chain students from Tsinghua University in China and the University of Maryland. Penagos learned at the competition, as part of a breakfast meeting, that she had won.
“It was pretty nice, to be honest,” she said with a smile. “I was surrounded by the people I’ve known from the conference for three or four years, people whose work I have read. It’s a community that keeps growing. It was nice to see that what we do is important, that it’s recognized.”
To have her mentor, Assistant Professor Trilce Encarnación, in the audience made it even more special. This award is, Encarnacion said, a big deal.
“INFORMS is the global home for analytics and operations research, and these awards are judged by people who truly live and breathe this work,” she said. “It shows that Paula’s research stands up against some of the best in the world and that she can communicate its impact beyond the academic setting. For UMSL, it’s powerful validation that our students can compete, and win, on the highest stage. Yes, the other finalists were from larger, more established universities, but that only makes Paula’s achievement more meaningful. She won because the science was strong, and the execution was outstanding.”
Here is the award-winning video.
“Paula’s been an excellent PhD student, and this project really shows why,” Encarnacion said. “What stands out most is her balance of rigor and clarity, she takes a real, complex humanitarian logistics problem and frames it in a way practitioners can immediately relate to. Her methods are careful and transparent, and her storytelling makes the findings easy to follow.”
Winning this award shows not only how much Penagos has grown as an academic but how the influence from faculty members in UMSL’s department have shaped her as a person.
Assistant Professor Trilce Encarnacion (left), who has been a mentor to Paula Penagos since she arrived at UMSL, was in Atlanta to celebrate Penagos’ award-winning video. (Photo courtesy of Paula Penagos)
“I come from a background in logistics and transportation that wasn’t necessarily humanitarian logistics, so that’s one of the first things I learned from Dr. Encarnacion, and that’s something I wanted to transition to,” Penagos said. “I moved from civil engineering and areas like trucking and railway systems to something that was more people-driven and impacted in a certain way. One of the first things that she helped me with was how to gather my thoughts around what I wanted to do. I’ve been lucky because she’s not only a good researcher, but she’s an excellent human being.”
Penagos, who is from Colombia, earned her civil engineering degree at Universidad Nacional de Colombia at Medellin. She finished her master’s in supply chain analytics from UMSL in 2024 and is more than halfway through her PhD program. One of the things she’s come to love about the UMSL program is the continued support for engaging broader audiences and representing the university in the St. Louis area and beyond.
“Every year UMSL has had a bigger presence at this conference, and it’s because our PhD program is growing,” she said. “When I started going, I was the only PhD student from UMSL, and this year there were three of us, on top of the professors. Our program keeps growing, and our visibility is growing across many stations. We have so many projects at the same time, and they’re all having an influence.”
