Research

Mehmet Altug, an associate professor of operations management, has been researching retail returns policies for a decade. The issue has recently come to prominence, as the lenient policies of online retailers have led to skyrocketing return rates (now exceeding 20 percent in the U.S.). Altug’s various academic papers delve into the difficult trade-offs retailers face when setting returns policies. While there are no easy answers, Altug’s research identifies factors that can help retailers achieve more strategic flexibility.

The NSF Research Traineeship Program program was established in 2019 with a five-year grant of nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation and is preparing an interdisciplinary, community-engaged STEM workforce with the expertise necessary for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Professor of Nursing Rebecca Sutter, along with faculty and students across colleges, will lead the creation of an interprofessional Learning Laboratory for Community Health.   

Associate Professor Max Albanese collaborated with Palo Alto Research Center to launch the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework, a tool that publishes continuously updated rankings of the most-common global software weaknesses. The work has resulted in multiple pending patent applications and a Best Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Security and Cryptography.

Sylvia Schreiner is on a mission to record and help maintain the Yupik language on St. Lawrence Island, and she has the support of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant to do it.

George Mason University researcher Allison Jack recently received an Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) Network award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research efforts aimed at understanding why some autistic individuals receive very late diagnoses, or none at all.  

For most drivers in the U.S., obeying a stop sign upon approaching an intersection is an unavoidable annoyance. But for Mason finance professor Jiasun Li, it’s a problem waiting to be solved. His recent working paper proposes a simple and economical improvement: removing one stop sign from every four-way intersection. According to his calculations, this would boost not only driver safety, but environmental sustainability as well. 

Assistant Professor Vijay Shah from the Department of Cyber Security Engineering at George Mason University's College of Engineering and Computing, teamed up with colleagues in Arlington, Virginia, to build drones that monitor and improve the safety of firefighters in action.

Mason researchers Jeffrey Moran in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rémi Veneziano in the Department of Bioengineering, and Monique van Hoek, a microbiologist in the School of Systems Biology, won the NBIB R21 Trailblazer award. The team will research methods to dissolve harmful biofilms.

Mason doctoral candidate Chelsea Gray's research on social attitudes helped demonstrate strong public support in Ireland for basking shark conservation.