Industrial Engineering Department in Spotlight at National Conference

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Industrial engineering students and faculty received a variety of honors at the annual conference of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers held May 20-24 in New Orleans.

Manuel Rossetti was the recipient of the the Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award. The award recognizes educators who contribute significantly to the industrial engineering profession through teaching, research and publication, extension, innovation or administration.

Taking home the title of fellow of the institute was Chase Rainwater. The 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.

John White, chancellor emeritus of the U of A, received the Joint Publishers Book-of-the-Year Award for his book, Why It Matters: Reflections on Practical Leadership.

Released in October 2022, the book has received high acclaim from numerous sources including bestseller in many categories on Amazon.com. The text is based in part upon the Leadership Practices and Principles course he designed and taught at the U of A, which resulted in him receiving the Outstanding Teaching Award from the U of A Alumni Association.

White was also the recipient of a Best Paper Award in the Facilities Design & Planning Track for his paper "Performance Analysis of a Class-based Robotic Compact Storage and Retrieval System" with his co-authors, Mahmut Tutam and Jingming Liu.

A team of master's students that included Jannatul Shefa, Md Sazid Rahman and Dewan Maisha Zaman, advised by Sandra Eksioglu, received the Logistics and Supply Chain Division Student Case Award for their study titled "A Case Study for Large-Scale Vehicle Routing." This was an international competition open to any student team.

Shefa also took second place in the Logistics and Supply Chain Division Best Student Paper Competition for her paper "Qualitative Analysis of Stakeholder Interviews to Explain Operational Characteristics of Staging Areas for Hurricane Disaster Response." Her adviser is Ashlea Milburn.

Doctoral candidate Guanzhou Wei was the recipient of the Best Paper Award in the Data Analytics and Information Systems track for his paper titled "Irregularly Sampled Time Series Classification Using Neural Stochastic Differential Equation." Wei is advised by Xiao Liu.

Also, in the Data Analytics and Information Systems track, the team of Maryam Kheirandish Borujeni, Jose Carlos Hernandez Azucena and Seyyed Farid Hashemian were selected as finalists in the Student Data Analytics Competition for their work on causal inference for predicting treatment outcome in breast cancer. Shengfan Zhang was their adviser.

Blake Sooter received the Operations Research Division Undergraduate Student Research Dissemination Award for his paper titled "Open-Source Optimization of Green Last Mile Delivery Systems." Blake is advised by Rainwater.

Paris Joslin took part in the IISE Capstone Competition. Joslin served as leader for her capstone team, which included members Nathan Skinner, Will Cunningham, Conner Oxford and Zach Leondike. Their project, "A Decision Support Tool to Automate and Optimize Contract Staffing using Linear Programming," for Infinity Labs LLC, received the Project of the Year Award at the Industrial Engineering 2023 Capstone Symposium. Joslin was interviewed by the IISE podcast Problem Solved about her project. You can listen to the interview here.

Seven industrial engineering students received scholarships from IISE this year. Karleigh Eoff received the Dwight D. Gardner Scholarship. Gabe Hesington was the recipient of the Marvin Mundel Scholarship. Three students received the Harold and Inge Marcus scholarship: Katie Augsburger, John Maxwell and Cesar Trujillo. Graduate students Maryam Kheirandish Borijeni and Adetola Odebode received the John L. Imhoff Scholarship. Ashlea Milburn coordinates the IISE scholarship nomination process.