Tim Russell
Research Scientist / Engineer MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics
- Boston MA
Tim Russell develops interactive applications to support supply chain decision-making and leads humanitarian supply chain research.
MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics
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Social
Biography
Research Focus
Critical Systems & Supply Network Resilience
Ensuring continuity, preparedness, and mission assurance under disruption and geopolitical volatility.
Supply Chain Strategy & Network Architecture
Designing the structural configuration and competitive positioning of supply networks.
Human-Centered Systems & Quality of Life
Designing systems, services, and policies that enhance human well-being across work, home, and society.
Areas of Expertise
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MEng
Logistics and Supply Chain Management
2005
Georgia Institute of Technology
BSCS
Computer Science
1996
Affiliations
- Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab : Research Engineer
- CAVE Lab : Research Engineer
Languages
- English
- Albanian
- Macedonian
Research Papers
Southern California Catastrophic Earthquake Scenario: Workshop Summary
MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics Research PaperAndrew Ryan, Timothy Russell, John Holdsworth, Jarrod Goentzel
2026-01-01
Southern California faces a daunting reality: over the next 30 years, there is a 37% chance of a magnitude 7.5 or greater earthquake causing a catastrophic breakdown of the systems, infrastructure, and supply chains across the region. Disaster response is often framed as a government responsibility, but the supply chain itself is privately owned and operated.
Bmsspy: A python package and empirical comparison of bounded multi-source shortest path algorithm
MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics Research PaperConnor Makowski, Willem Guter, Timothy Russell, Austin Saragih, Lucas Castro
2025-11-19
We introduce BMSSPy, the first open-source Python package faithfully implementing the Bounded Multi-Source Shortest Path (BMSSP) algorithm, recently proposed as a breakthrough beyond Dijkstra's sorting barrier for single-source shortest paths. BMSSPy translates theoretical advances into practice: it preserves the algorithm's asymptotic performance guarantees while returning both distance labels and route predecessors. Our implementation resolves core ambiguities in pivot selection, tight-edge forest construction, and frontier management that prior work left open for practitioners.
Type Enforced: A Python type enforcer for type annotations
Journal of Open Source SoftwareConnor Makowski, Willem Guter, Timothy Russell
2025-09-30
Python’s dynamic typing system offers flexibility but can lead to runtime errors that are difficult to diagnose in web applications, complex scientific software, and research applications. Static type checking tools such as Mypy provide valuable compile-time validation; however, they do not prevent runtime type errors. Existing runtime enforcement libraries often require extensive boilerplate code or lack support for advanced typing features and nested structures.
SCGraph: A Lightweight Python Package for Road, Rail ,and Maritime Shortest Path Algorithms, Benchmarking, and Applications
MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics Research PaperConnor Makowski, Austin Saragih, Willem Guter, Timothy Russell, Arne Heinold Kühn, Spyridon Lekkakos
2025-08-12
SCGraph (Supply Chain Graph) is a Python package that provides light, offline, accurate multimodal routing and network-based distance estimation across global road, rail, and maritime networks. Serving as a streamlined modeling abstraction, SCGraph bundles seven curated global networks and integrates seamlessly with OSMnx, eliminating the heavy setup overhead of traditional routing engines.
Scaling Post-Disaster Housing Capacity
MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics Research PaperLauren Finegan, Jarrod Goentzel, Erin Reissman, Tim Russell, Drew Story
2025-07-17
In January 2024, the Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held a roundtable on the theme of scaling construction capacity after disasters, convening individuals from academia, nonprofit, and public and private sector organizations. Participants brought varied perspectives, including considerations of supply chains, government policies, building codes, and private sector construction operations. To ensure candor, the event was held under Chatham House Rule.
Modeling Operational Flow Capacity and Evaluating Disaster Interventions for Fuel Distribution
Production and Operations ManagementShraddha Rana, Timothy Russell and Jarrod Goentze
2024-02-05
Fuel is an essential commodity in society with an amplified role during disasters. Disasters often cause a spike in demand for fuel and impose physical and operational constraints on fuel distribution. Accordingly, public and private sector stakeholders seek disaster preparedness and response interventions to ensure an adequate supply of fuel for emergency activities. We develop models to quantify downstream operational flow capacity, i.e., the volume of fuel that can be distributed from bulk storage terminals to retail gas stations via tanker trucks.
Vaccine network design to maximize immunization coverage
Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain ManagementJarrod Goentzel; Timothy Russell; Henrique Ribeiro Carretti; Yuto Hashimoto
2022-06-13
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to consider how to reach vulnerable communities with extended outreach services to improve vaccination uptake. The authors created an optimization model to align with decision-makers' objective to maximize immunization coverage within constrained budgets and deploy resources considering empirical data and endogenous demand.
