Industrial Engineering Students Recognized With Department Awards

The Department of Industrial Engineering recognizes students each spring at the Annual Industrial Engineering Student Awards Banquet. This year, the event returned to the pre-pandemic format with faculty, students, staff and alumni meeting together at the Fayetteville Town Center on April 27.

The department handed out its most prestigious awards, and the Arkansas Academy of Industrial Engineering awarded more than $224,500 in scholarships to 62 deserving students.

Departmental Awards

The Outstanding Senior and Outstanding Graduate Student awards are intended to recognize the top industrial engineering undergraduate and graduate student. The winners are selected by faculty vote based on excellence in academic performance, leadership, service, collegiality, ethics and dedication. The Graduate Research Award is also selected by faculty vote and recognizes the graduate student who made the most valuable contribution to departmental research efforts in 2021.

Mohammadmahdi Hajiha

The honor of Outstanding Graduate Student for 2022 went to Mohammadmahdi Hajiha. With his adviser, Xiao Liu, Hajiha has been conducting research in Bayesian statistics with applications in a variety of areas, including predictive analysis, statistical learning and machine learning. He has published his research in the Journal of Quality Technology, has a paper under second-round review with the Journal of Reliability Engineering and System Safety and authored a book chapter in the Handbook of Smart Energy Systems. He completed an operations research internship with FedEx Freight, working on the network optimization team. He was also active on campus, serving as an officer in the Iranian Student Association.

Maryam Kheirandish

The 2021 Graduate Research Award was presented to Maryam Kheirandish. Kheirandish has been conducting research in medical decision making. She developed a landmark modeling method and machine learning algorithms for tuberculosis treatment outcome prediction. In 2021, she published this work in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and presented it at the INFORMS annual meeting. Her adviser, Shengfan Zhang, speaks very highly of her performance as data manager for several collaborative research projects, where she designs data collection forms and trains international team members on data related issues.

The Outstanding Senior award is intended to recognize the most outstanding undergraduate industrial engineering student who graduated in Fall 2021 or is graduating in either Spring or Summer 2022.

Coleman Warren

Coleman Warren was recognized this year as the 2022 Industrial Engineering Outstanding Senior. Warren has represented the core values of this award to the highest standard throughout his time on campus. This is evidenced by his selection as our ArcBest Outstanding Freshman in 2019, a great start to his academic career. But his accolades do not end there. He has served our department as a senior capstone project manager and as an officer in our student chapter of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has served our college as a First-Year Engineering peer mentor. He has served the entire university student body as Associated Student Government president. He started an ice cream business, Simple + Sweet Creamery, that is focused on fighting child hunger in Northwest Arkansas. To date, Simple + Sweet has donated over 35,000 meals through the NWA Food Bank. Somehow, in addition, he has managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA and complete an undergraduate honors thesis. In 2021, he was awarded a Truman Scholarship, and in 2022, he was named a Rhodes Scholar, making him the only undergraduate student in the history of the U of A to receive both prestigious awards.

Coleman was also recently selected as the 2022 Outstanding Senior Student for the College of Engineering.

Honors Graduates

The seniors who completed an honors thesis were recognized this year as an added feature. The following students completed an honors thesis:

• Brandon Jerome: Analyzing Vulnerabilities in the Northwest Arkansas Highway Network Using Mathematical Optimization, advised by Kelly Sullivan.
• Coleman Warren: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Food Pantry Accessibility in Washington County, Arkansas, advised by Ashlea Milburn.
• Luke Weiner: Comparing Actively Managed Mutual Fund Categories to Index Funds using Linear Regression and Portfolio Optimization, advised by Greg Parnell.
• Luke Welch: Implementing the CMS+ Sports Ranking Algorithm in a JavaFx Environment, advised by Richard Cassady.

Industry-Sponsored Awards

Daniel Terry

Each year, the ArcBest Corporation sponsors the Outstanding Freshman Award. This award is presented to one first-year engineering student who has declared industrial engineering as a major and is selected by the faculty and staff of the First-Year Engineering Program.

The 2022 ArcBest Outstanding Freshman Award goes to Daniel Terry.

Corporate sponsor Hytrol Conveyors presents the annual Hytrol Challenge Award, given each year to the best team in a competition in the transportation logistics or facility logistics course. This year, the competition is from a group project in Introduction to Transportation Logistics.

The team of Emma Regier and Austin Wood are the recipients of the Hytrol Challenge Award for 2021. Regier and Wood earned the highest average score across three projects in INEG 4633: Transportation Logistics in Fall 2021. The three projects related to optimizing less-than-truckload pricing contracts, locating facilities in a supply chain network and designing vehicle routes to satisfy over 250 delivery requests.