WYOMISSING, Pa. — With approximately 12% of the population in Berks and Schuylkill Counties living in poverty, food banks are a critical resource for those who face hunger issues. Penn State Berks faculty are collaborating with faculty at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local food banks. The team has recently received a seed grant from the Penn State Institute for Computational Data Sciences (ICDS) as part of Penn State's Inter-Institutional Program for Diversifying Research (IPDR) to explore this issue.

Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology; Sadan Kulturel-Konak, professor of management information systems and the director of the college’s Flemming Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) Center; and Ryan Hassler, teaching professor of mathematics, are working on a project titled “Food bank operations optimization: Data-driven societal impact approach (FOODSIA).”

According to Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank in Reading, which serves both Berks and Schuylkill Counties, more than 110,000 individuals in both Berks and Schuylkill Counties qualify for food assistance, presenting significant operational and logistical challenges for food pantries to offer support. The researchers from Penn State Berks and NCAT will collaborate with Helping Harvest to tackle significant challenges in food distribution logistics.

Hassler is also chair of the board of directors for Helping Harvest.

“Our current strategic plan at Helping Harvest includes a goal to adjust our distribution model to increase the number of people we feed and to increase the efficiency in which this process occurs," Hassler said. "As the chair of the board of directors, I am excited to partner with my colleagues at Penn State Berks and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to achieve this goal as we continue striving towards making Berks and Schuylkill Counties a better place to learn and live.”

Jay Worrall, Helping Harvest president, echoed the sentiment.

“Since 2020, Helping Harvest has gone from distributing $8.7 million worth of food annually to $19.9 million in fiscal year 2024. At that volume, we really need to identify strategies to utilize our limited transportation resources more efficiently,” Worrall said. “To have the support of Penn State Berks and the other partners on this project is critical to our ability to improve our services to the residents of Berks and Schuylkill Counties.”

Penn State Berks faculty will be working collaboratively with Lauren Davis, professor of industrial and systems engineering, and Steven Jiang, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, both with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a minority-serving institutions.

This project leverages NCAT’s experience in modeling food bank operations and Penn State’s strategic capabilities to enhance both institutions’ research and teaching capacities at the intersection of predictive analytics, decision sciences and operations research with tangible societal impacts. The Penn State Berks Artificial Intelligence, Modeling, and Simulation Laboratory (AIMS Lab) will leverage its computing resources and engage undergraduate students in this impactful research.

Additionally, this community-engaged research project aims to yield new methods for integrating social justice and equity into complex decision-making processes within food distribution networks, the researchers said. The aim is to develop innovative predictive models and optimization techniques that account for both societal impacts on underserved communities and traditional cost-based performance metrics.

For more information, contact Konak at auk3@psu.edu.

About the Penn State Inter-Institutional Program for Diversifying ResearchThe IPDR program offers interdisciplinary seed grant funding aimed at developing new or leveraging existent strategic partnerships and alliances with MSIs. The funding, up to $30,000 per project, supports collaborative work investigating broad and diverse topics. The program is spearheaded by a team at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and in collaboration with the Social Science Research Institute, Materials Research Institute (MRI), the Institute of Energy and the Environment, the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the Cancer Institute.