Institute Honors Rainwater with Title of Fellow

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Professor Chase Rainwater, department head of industrial engineering, was awarded the title of fellow from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE). This honor recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial and systems engineering. A fellow is the highest classification of membership in the institute.

Rainwater is a graduate of the U of A Department of Industrial Engineering, receiving his bachelor's degree in 2004. He earned his doctoral degree from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida in 2009. He joined the U of A Department of Industrial Engineering as assistant professor the same year.

He teaches multiple courses in computing, as well as courses in optimization, probability and statistics. Rainwater's commitment to students is exceptional. He spends countless hours helping students understand the material in his courses. He also provides mentorship to students in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, which includes working with undergraduate research students, senior capstone teams and the Google-sponsored applied machine learning intensive.

He and University Professor Manuel Rossetti led an innovative change to the computing offerings in the department's undergraduate program. This effort resulted in a two-semester computing sequence designed specifically for sophomore-level industrial engineering students. The courses present core programming and computing concepts in the context of fundamental industrial engineering problems.  The duo was recognized internationally with the 2021 Innovations in Education Competition from IISE.

Rainwater's research interests include supply chain logistics, security and food safety. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Education, as well as multiple national labs, nonprofit organizations and companies.  

He was a 2018 program chair of the IISE Annual Conference and Expo, served as president of the IISE Operations Research Division in 2018 and was a member of the IISE Board of Trustees Scholarship Committee from 2017-2020. He has served as the director of the J.B. Hunt Innovation Center of Excellence since its creation and is also the co-director of the Arkansas Security Research and Education Institute.