• Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing (in Sharing/Platform Economy)
• Reinforcement Learning; Approximate Dynamic Programming; Multi-armed Bandits, Restless Bandits
• Healthcare Operations Management; Resource allocation
• Discrete Choice Modelling

I am always looking for aspirational PhD students who are interested in pursuing research in the following areas: revenue management and dynamic pricing, reinforcement learning applied in particular to sharing/platform economy, and healthcare operations management. I also welcome PhD students elsewhere who work in these or similar areas for a short period of visit at Lancaster. PhD funding is available through the Department of Management Science and through the STOR-i Doctoral Training Centre. More information can be found in the Lancaster University Management School webpage. For informal discussions please feel free to contact me by email.

Dong Li is a Professor of Operational Research at Lancaster University Management School. Before taking this post Dong was a Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Operations Management at Loughborough Business School. Prior to that he was a Lecturer in Operations Management at University of York. Apart from the academic posts, Dong had worked as an operations researcher in AVIS Budget Group (Bracknell, UK) and Intel Corp (Shanghai, China). He holds a BEng and MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He also obtained an MEng in Industrial Engineering from National University of Singapore. Dong received his PhD degree in Management Science from Lancaster University.

Dong’s main research interests include Revenue Management and Pricing (applied in Sharing/Platform economy), Discrete Choice Modelling, Scheduling and Resource Allocation (in Healthcare in particular). Methodologically he is mostly skilled in Markov Decision Process, Approximate Dynamic Programming, Reinforcement Learning, and Multi-armed Bandits (Restless Bandits). Dong has also done significant works in Stochastic Programming.

His research has appeared in top peer reviewed international journals including, Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research Society, Naval Research Logistics, Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, OR Spectrum, Transportation Research Part E, Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research, and etc.

Dong is an associate editor of Computational Management Science. 

• Associate Editor of Computational Management Science
• Co-Chair, Yorkshire and the Humber Regional Committee, Operational Research Society
• Member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College

• 2020- present: External examiner at Strathclyde University
• 2020- present: External examiner at Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, China

2020-22: UKRI (EPSRC), £145k, Co-Principal Investigator, COVID-19: An Algorithmic Model for Critical Medical Resource Rationing in a Public Health Emergency