Dong Li’s prize-winning thesis contained analyses of a class of stochastic scheduling models concerned with the  allocation of scarce resources to a collection of jobs/patients/customers  who will become unavailable for service (because of impatience or death, say) at an uncertain point in the future. The goal is to allocate the server to the waiting jobs/patients/customers  so as to maximise the mean number served to completion. 

This is a simply stated problem whose solution is incredibly challenging. Dong developed some solution approaches which achieved levels of performance which comfortably surpassed those in the literature. He also considered the so-called triage problem in which the above decision problem is supported by an imperfect initial assessment of the resource needs and degree of impatience (urgency) of the jobs to be served. Dong’s work has appeared in the top journals Naval Research Logistics and European Journal of Operational Research. He has just begun work as a lecturer at York University.