Deniz Karakoc

Assistant Professor,

School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Mail code: 8809

Campus: Tempe
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Long Bio

Deniz Karakoc joins the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence as an assistant professor in industrial engineering. She was an invitee to the Civil and Environmental Engineering Rising Stars early career program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was awarded the 2023–2024 Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Her work on enhancing the resilience of agri-food flow networks to ensure food security has been published in many top journals.

Education

PhD University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Research Website URL

https://denizberfinkarakoc.github.io/

Google Scholar URL

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OYaqcuYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Research Interests

My research introduces data-driven interdisciplinary frameworks to improve the resilience of agricultural and food systems as well as their supporting critical infrastructures across spatial scales. In my research, I heavily utilize data analytics, network science, operations research, and geographic information science techniques.

The overarching goal of my research is to provide higher-resolution real-world information to better understand and improve the resilience of such essential systems that society relies on daily.

Publications

Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, and Megan Konar. "Trade-offs between resilience, sustainability and cost in the US agri-food transportation infrastructure." Nature Food (2025): 1-9.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, and Megan Konar. "Optimization of national grain imports to balance risk and return: a portfolio theory approach." Environmental Research: Food Systems 1, no. 1 (2024): 011001.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, Megan Konar, Michael J. Puma, and Lav R. Varshney. "Structural chokepoints determine the resilience of agri-food supply chains in the United States." Nature Food 4, no. 7 (2023): 607-615.
Pandit, Akshay, Deniz Berfin Karakoc, and Megan Konar. "Spatially detailed agricultural and food trade between China and the United States." Environmental Research Letters 18, no. 8 (2023): 084031.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, Kash Barker, and Andrés D. González. "Analyzing the tradeoff between vulnerability and recoverability investments for interdependent infrastructure networks." Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 87 (2023): 101508.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, Junren Wang, and Megan Konar. "Food flows between counties in the United States from 2007 to 2017." Environmental Research Letters 17, no. 3 (2022): 034035.
Wang, Junren, Deniz Berfin Karakoc, and Megan Konar. "The carbon footprint of cold chain food flows in the United States." Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability (2022).
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, and Megan Konar. "A complex network framework for the efficiency and resilience trade-off in global food trade." Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 10 (2021): 105003.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, Kash Barker, Christopher W. Zobel, and Yasser Almoghathawi. "Social vulnerability and equity perspectives on interdependent infrastructure network component importance." Sustainable Cities and Society 57 (2020): 102072.
Karakoc, Deniz Berfin, Yasser Almoghathawi, Kash Barker, Andrés D. González, and Shima Mohebbi. "Community resilience-driven restoration model for interdependent infrastructure networks." International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 38 (2019): 101228.

Courses

2025 Fall

Course Number	Course Title
IEE 534	Supply Chain Modeling&Analysis
IEE 534	Supply Chain Modeling&Analysis

2025 Spring

Course Number	Course Title
IEE 799	Dissertation
IEE 210	Intro Industrial Engineering

2024 Fall

Course Number	Course Title
IEE 792	Research
IEE 799	Dissertation