Industrial Engineering Doctoral Student Earns Third Military Research Fellowship

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Nick Shallcross

An industrial engineering doctoral student has earned a military research scholarship to further his research into decision-making in complex system design and Department of Defense acquisitions.

Doctoral candidate and active duty Army officer Nick Shallcross was notified earlier this year he is the recipient of his third General Omar N. Bradley Research Fellowship. He had previously received this fellowship in 2019 and 2020.

The fellowship is given to support an active duty military officer to pursue research in mathematical sciences. Selection for the fellowship is made without regard to rank, branch or affiliation and is granted to officers who are actively engaged in research or have the best-developed plans for providing significant contributions to Army and defense-related problems.

Shallcross has used his previous two fellowships, along with a scholarship presented by the Seth Bonder Foundation, to fund his current research. This research, advised by Greg Parnell, director of the Operations Management Program, has provided significant contributions across several disciplines focusing on the use of information theory, set-based design and model-based engineering to inform complex system design decisions.

Shallcross has presented this research at several professional conferences including multiple presentations at the Military Operations Research Society symposium, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, American Society for Engineering Management annual conferences, and the Conference on Systems Engineering Research. The research has also contributed to several published and forthcoming papers advancing the theory and practices of set-based design, model-based engineering, program management and decision analysis. Shallcross plans to complete and defend his dissertation this summer prior to assuming duties at his next assignment.

Parnell said, "This third award recognizes the important contribution of Nick's research on Quantitative Set-Based Design to improving system decision-making for complex defense systems."

The Military Operations Research Society fellowship has a long and distinguished history, dating back more than 50 years. The first MORS Symposium was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research-Pasadena in 1957. By the eighth MORS Symposium, the event became a nationally oriented joint-service meeting. In 1966, the Military Operations Research Society incorporated and is led by an elected 28-member Board of Directors and supported by a professional staff. The Military Operations Research Society holds a Department of Defense contract with funding from the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and the Office of the Secretary of the Defense.