Wathsala Karunarathne received her PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she was a student member of OPTIMA and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). Her research interests include stochastic modelling, optimisation, data-driven queueing challenges, and pattern question answering. Wathsala’s thesis was titled ‘Scheduling in Queueing Systems,’ which was supervised by OPTIMA CIs Professor Peter Taylor and Dr. Mark Fackrell. After completing her PhD, she joined the Teletraffic Research Centre (TRC) at the University of Adelaide as a Research Associate. There, she works on several projects on optimal cutting problems, time series forecasting, and pattern question answering problems with leading industry partners.