Louisville native and United States Marine Corps veteran John Davis is a senior majoring in .

After attending a small liberal arts college in central Kentucky, Davis decided college was not for him and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2012, where he served until 2022. 

Davis then enrolled at the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, which he calls the “best engineering school in Kentucky.”

As an infantryman in the Marine Corps, Davis worked his way up to sergeant, infantry squad leader and marksmanship instructor.

After boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, his first assignment was with the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in Twentynine Palms, California as a scout.

While assigned to Twentynine Palms he deployed twice to the Pacific. During the first deployment, he was attached to the Combat Assault Battalion in Okinawa. During his second deployment, he was with the Battalion Landing Team of 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, which embarked aboard the USS Green Bay and the USS Bon Homme Richard.

In addition to Okinawa, Japan, his deployments took him to Thailand and the Philippines.

After reenlisting, Davis was stationed in Virginia at the Formal Marksmanship Training Center as a Designated Marksmanship Instructor. At first, he worked on a range facility on Naval Dam Neck Annex in Virginia Beach.

In 2018, the Formal Marksmanship Training Center’s operations moved to a new range facility aboard Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.

While assigned to the Formal Marksmanship Training Center, Davis’ duties included range safety officer and coach for individual shooters, who ranged from private to general.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, Davis’ unit was the only active Marine Corps range facility on the eastern seaboard. 

This caused the unit to become extremely busy. He recalls working virtually every weekend for the rest of 2020, as reserve units from as far as New York were bused down to meet their numbers.

Davis is married, with two young kids. He is currently working part-time in his third co-op at GE Appliances and anticipates working at GE after graduating from UofL.

“The competition was about redesigning an ambulatory endoscopy center to help mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19,” Sanchez said.

While including requirements imposed by the Centers for Disease Control on healthcare facilities, the pair were also asked to find ways to optimize the current facility using FlexSim, a simulation software. Once Sanchez and Pastor made the simulation and wrote a paper detailing their improvements, why they made those changes, and their results, they gave a presentation at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference.

With Sanchez finishing his final year of Speed School while working at an internship in Panama, and Pastor’s busy schedule of courses and playing field hockey for UofL, their collaboration had to happen through Microsoft Teams.

“Since it was difficult for us to be available at the same time, our key to success was to be organized, have weekly meetings, dividing the tasks each week and working independently,” Sanchez said.

The project required learning new simulation software, and the two were able to apply what they learned in their Simulation class with , also their faculty adviser on the project. In fact, Sanchez said they used many of the concepts learned in IE classes.

“For example, we had to conduct many experiments to find the best combination of resources and staff, so we did a design of experiments learned in ’s class,” he said.  “Also, we completely changed the layout of the healthcare facility to make it more efficient by applying concepts learned in our facility location and layout class with .”

The team was so motivated to do their best, that even after finishing the paper, they found a way to make their model more efficient with better results, so they rewrote the paper.

Project faculty advisor, Dr. Arsalan Paleshi

Paleshi said the students expressed interest in the competition when he offered it as an option to complete the required major simulation project in his Fall 2020 Simulation class.

“We met throughout the semester and discussed guidelines and how to prepare the material,” he said. When the two were selected as one of the top three teams, Paleshi said he gave them advice on how to improve their presentation. “This competition was not just against undergrads; graduate students also compete, and on an international level. I’m really proud of them.”

This is the first time UofL students have reached this level in this competition.

Faculty advisor Paleshi, who has been a full-time faculty member since 2016, said simulation modeling is experiencing an exponential growth in popularity.

“Now that we have more powerful computers and more sophisticated software, it’s affordable for even small companies to run simulation models,” he said. “In the past, only major corporations used it for strategic-level decisions, but now smaller companies have the capacity to do it at an operational or tactical level.”