How did you first become interested in this problem?

Yeah.

So there's actually a little story behind.

Uh, when I was a, [laughs] a first-year PhD student, I wanted to adopt a dog, so, um, I happened to know that, uh, my advisor, Professor Elaine Kotak, volunteers at a rescue.

And so she constantly has a lot of dogs she fosters at home.

So I wanted to see if I could a- um, adopt a dog from her rescue, and then I reached out to her.

We had a conversation.

[laughs] All right, before we dive into the math, could you paint a picture of what a typical shelter is dealing with on any given day? What makes managing these operations so challenging?