Leon McGinnis, Eugene C. Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, will give the 2011 Spencer Schantz Distinguished Lectures at Lehigh University on April 27-28, 2011.  The first lecture, titled "Model Based Industrial Engineering," is a technical talk for the students and faculty of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE). The second lecture, titled "Industrial Engineering—Quo Vadis? One Man’s Idiosyncratic View of His Profession," is for a general audience and will celebrate the career of Professor Mikell Groover after 50 years service in the ISE department. 

In his first lecture, McGinnis will describe the opportunity he thinks IE education is missing, namely how to become more mature users and creators of models, modeling language, and modeling tools. Providing examples, McGinnis said that he will demonstrate what can be accomplished when “we first focus our modeling work on describing the thing we are engineering, in its own terms, and then use that model as a platform for accessing the wide variety of analysis and synthesis tools already at our disposal.”

For the second lecture, McGinnis will sketch a history of IE, provide an assessment of where we are today, and make conjectures about the future of the profession.  While IE is a rapidly growing profession in the developing world, McGinnis says that there are troubling signs of professional decline here in the U.S.  Running through his talk is an attempt to answer the question: “What is it that we, as IEs, really do?” McGinnis says that “a successful and sustainable profession must have a clear and shared answer to that question.”   He will suggest an answer and identify some challenges the answer implies.

 This lecture series is endowed in the name of the late Spencer C. Schantz, who graduated from Lehigh in 1955 with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering. Following progressive responsibilities with several electrical manufacturing companies, in 1969, Schantz founded U.S. Controls Corporation and became its first CEO and president. The Spencer C. Schantz Distinguished Lecture Series was established by his wife Jerelyn as a valuable educational experience for faculty, students, and friends of Lehigh’s ISE department.