Devyon applied and successfully enrolled in Juma, and found a path to earn money, build his resume, and pave his future. As part of the program, Devyon took Georgia Tech LEAP courses to learn more about supply and logistics and the career paths the field has to offer. His dedication to the job, his willingness to go above what was expected of him and his attention to detail were characteristics that made him stand out to Juma’s Enterprise Managers. After successfully completing Juma’s training program, Devyon secured a job at UPS, a Juma Atlanta job placement partner. Today, Devyon has stable employment and, after successfully passing UPS’ Supervisor Exam, became a Shift Manager.

Learn about Devyon Johnson's story in the Juma website.

Zuma promotes participants to earn while they learn, so while going to school during the week to pursue her GED, Zaria took GT LEAP courses at night and worked in the Juma Atlanta concessions operations group on the weekend. Through perseverance and her will to succeed, she later secured fulltime employment within the JUMA organization.

At the Future of Work 2017 summit sponsored by The Atlantic, Zaria was asked about her experience. She commented, “sometimes, people just need a second chance and an opportunity to take advantage of it.” The experience has opened her eyes to the possibilities and Ms. Walker has aspirations to be a crime scene investigator. Zaria plan to pursue further education and make that dream a reality some day.

The Box Medal is named after George Box, the late British-American statistician who is considered one of the greatest statistical minds of our time. Box was extremely influential on Wu’s work during his formative years as a young academic at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Box was also a professor.

In a 2015 interview with Professor Hugh Chapman (Acadia University) and Professor Roshan Joseph (ISyE), Wu affirmed that Box was a tremendous influence: “[Box] was a great scholar and a great lecturer. His opinions and passion for work were contagious … I respected him a lot.”

According to the ENBIS website, the Box Medal honors the legacy of George Box and is awarded each year to “an extraordinary statistician who has remarkably contributed with his work to the development and the application of statistical methods in European business and industry.”

The ENBIS press release announcing Wu as this year’s Box Medal recipient stated that “with the medal, the link between two great statisticians is strengthened even further.”

The press release also specified that Wu was chosen for his many contributions to the study of statistics, as well as “his ability to clearly explain complex concepts … and for systematically passing on his knowledge.” Wu has supervised 45 Ph.D. students in the course of his career, many of whom are active researchers in the statistical sciences.

Wu will accept the Box Medal at the ENBIS conference, held from September 9-14, 2017, in Naples, Italy. While there, he will also deliver a keynote speech on September 12, 2017.   

About Jeff Wu

Wu earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971, and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Waterloo; the University of Michigan; and currently is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and professor in ISyE.

He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm; resampling methods; nonlinear least squares; sensitivity testing and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, robust parameter design and computer experiments; and has been credited for coining the term “data science” as early as 1997.

Wu has received several awards, including the COPSS Presidents’ Award (1987), the Shewhart Medal (2008), the R. A. Fisher Lectureship (2011), and the Deming Lecturer Award (2012). He is an elected member of Academia Sinica (2000) and the National Academy of Engineering (2004), and has received many other awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo.

He has published more than 170 peer-reviewed articles and two books. He was the second editor of Statistica Sinica.

INFORMS Fellows

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed and H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn were elected as 2017 INFORMS Fellows.

INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of OR/MS over a period of time.

Elected Position

Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera has been elected vice president/president-elect of INFORMS’ Transportation Science and Logistics Society (TSL). His term as president of TSL will begin in 2019. TSL is one of INFORMS’ largest societies, with nearly 900 members whose research interests focus on applied operations research and management science for the transportation and logistics sector.

Winners

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser, and Juan Pablo Vielma (Ph.D. IE 09) won the INFORMS Computing Society Prize for their pioneering work on mixed integer linear programming formulations for piece-wise linear functions.

George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor Chip White; Ph.D. students Can Zhang and Chenxi Zeng; and Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil won first prize in the MSOM Practice-based Research Competition for their paper “Analysis and Improvement of Blood Collection Operations.”

The paper focused on how the group’s work impacted the American Red Cross’s blood collection operations.

Ph.D. student Rui Gao won the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Wasserstein Distributional Robustness and Regularization in Statistical Learning,” co-authored by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt and Xi Chen (NYU).

The paper establishes a close connection between distributionally robust stochastic optimization and regularization in statistical learning. Such connection suggests a systematic way to regularize high-dimensional, non-convex problems, which is demonstrated through the training of generative adversarial networks in deep learning.

Guido Lagos (Ph.D. IE 17), currently a postdoc at the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Universidad de Chile, won the Best Student Paper Award from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. The award was for his work “On the Euler Discretization Error of Brownian Motion about Random Time.” The paper was co-authored with Lagos’ advisor, Adjunct Associate Professor Ton Dieker.

In the paper, they derive new weak limits on the error of approximating Brownian motion by its Euler discretization about times of extremes and about times of barrier-hits. They then extend these results to give the asymptotic error of approximating Gaussian random walks by Brownian motion. More importantly, though, with this collection of results they clarify the connection between several papers in the literature where a specific constant involving the Riemann zeta function has appeared. These papers cover different areas and span several decades, and the precise connection between them was an intriguing open question until now.

Assistant Professor Siva Theja Maguluri and Rayadurgam Srikant received the Best Publication in Applied Probability Award, which is awarded every two years by the INFORMS Probability Society, for “Heavy Traffic Queue Length Behavior in a Switch Under Max-Weight Algorithm.”

The paper represents a major breakthrough in resource scheduling. It positively settles the conjecture that the max-weight scheduling is delay optimal in the heavy traffic regime in which the system is fully loaded. Furthermore, Maguluri and Srikant establish how the waiting time under the maximum weight scheduling policy scales with the number of input streams when compared with any other scheduling policy in the heavy traffic regime.

Ph.D. student Ethan Mark won the INFORMS Poster Competition for “Reducing Discarded Organs and Improving Physician-patient Decision-making via Decision-support Tools and Systems Optimization,” in collaboration with Professor David Goldsman; William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Scholarship, College of Engineering Pinar Keskinocak; Hannah Smalley (Ph.D. IE 12); Associate Professor Joel Sokol; and Dr. Brian Gurbaxani of the CDC.

The team built an interactive program that can help a transplant recipient choose between accepting an organ that is potentially infected by a disease or waiting for a standard organ. The organs that were considered are the heart, liver, kidney, and lung. The diseases that were considered were hepatitis C, hepatitis B, HIV, and encephalitis.

Assistant Professor Andy Sun, Alvaro Lorca (Ph.D. OR 16), Eugene Litvinov, and Tongxin Zheng won the INFORMS ENRE Best Publication in Energy Award for “Multistage Adaptive Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem.”

The work proposes a new generation of robust optimization models and efficient algorithms for operating future large-scale power systems with significant penetration of stochastic renewable energy sources. The new models have been implemented and tested on the real system operated by the ISO New England, a leading company in the U.S. electric energy market, and have shown significant advantages in reducing generation cost and increasing reliability of the power system over current industry practice and existing approaches.

Ph.D. student Can Zhang, in collaboration with George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer and Professors Atalay Atasu and Beril Toktay from Scheller College of Business, won first prize in the MSOM Society’s Best Student Paper Competition for “Mechanism Design for Medical Surplus Product Allocation.” The paper also received first prize in the INFORMS-wide Doing Good with Good OR Competition Student Paper Competition.

The MSOM student paper prize is one of the most prestigious awards a Ph.D. student can receive from INFORMS, and the competition drew 87 entrants this year. Winning the Doing Good with Good OR competition is an important indication of the quality and applicability of an academic paper on socially responsible business.

The paper studied how Medshare, a medical surplus recovery organization, matched the medical supply surplus in the U.S. with medical needs in the developing world, and developed novel and implementable solutions for Medshare’s supply and demand match problem through recipient selection.

First Runner-up

Professor Eva Lee and an interdisciplinary team of students that includes ISyE undergraduates Ryan Eckhaus, Shefali Jain, Kevin Kwon, Joe Malecki, and Alan Thomas; ISyE master’s students Chenman Cheng and Kumbit Hwang; and Yuanbo Wong, Autumn Phillips, and Surina Puri were selected as the first runner-up for the NSF Health Organization Transformation Innovation award for “Machine Learning for Evidence-based Practice, Risk Prediction, and Optimal Care Coordination.”

Third-Place

Ph.D. student Xiaowei Yue received third place in the INFORMS Best Poster Presentation Award for “Ultra-high Precision Predictive Assembly of Composite Fuselage Joins via Surrogate Model Based Control.” This is a joint work with Ph.D. student Yuchen Wen and Jeffrey Hunt (Boeing).

Honorable Mentions

Alvaro Lorca (Ph.D. 16), who was advised by Assistant Professor Andy Sun and is now an assistant professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the Catholic University of Chile, received an honorable mention in the INFORMS George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award for his Ph.D. thesis, “Robust Optimization for Renewable Energy Integration in Electrical Power Systems.”

Weijun Xie (Ph.D. OR 17), who was advised by Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed and is now an assistant professor in the ISE Department at Virginia Tech, received an honorable mention in the George Nicholson Student Paper Competition for “On Deterministic Reformulations of Distributionally Robust Joint Chance Constrained Optimization Problems.”

Finalists

The joint work of George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer; Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor Chip White; Ph.D. students Can Zhang and Chenxi Zeng; and Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil, “American Red Cross: Analytics-based Methods Improve Blood Collection Operations,” was selected as a finalist for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Ph.D. student Junzhuo Chen was a finalist for the Quality, Statistics, & Reliability Student Paper Award for “S3T: An Efficient Score Statistic for Spatio-temporal Surveillance,” in collaboration with Professor Seong-Hee Kim and Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie.

Ph.D. student Rui Gao’s paper, “Wasserstein Distributional Robustness and Regularization in Statistical Learning,” co-authored by Associate Professor Anton Kleywegt and Xi Chen (NYU), was also a runner-up for the INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper Award.

Joshua Hale (Ph.D. IE 17), Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Enlu Zhou, and Jiming Peng were finalists for the Journal of Global Optimization Best Paper Award, for their work "A Lagrangian Search Method for the P-median Problem."

Fifth-year undergraduate student Chungjae Lee was a finalist for the Undergraduate Operations Research Prize for building on the work of his spring 2017 Senior Design Team, “Contact Tracing Protocol.” The team was co-advised by William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development & Scholarship, College of Engineering Pinar Keskinocak and Dr. Brian Gurbaxani from the CDC.

Professor Eva Lee and a team including Ph.D. student Xin Wei, Francine Baker (Grady), Michael D. Wright (Grady), and Alexander Quarshie (Morehouse School of Medicine) were finalists for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for their work, "Outcome-driven Personalized Treatment Design for Managing Diabetes."

Lee and Ph.D. student Zhuonan Li, Ling Ling (MS Statistics 12), Ankit Agarwal (MSIE 2013), Michael Wright, and Alexander Quarshie were also finalists for the INFORMS Decision Analysis and Society of Decision Professionals Practice Award for “Reducing Surgical-site Infections.”

Ph.D. student Xiaowei Yue was a finalist for the SAS Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Tensor Mixed Effects Model with Applications in Nanomanufacturing Inspection,” in collaboration with Jin Gyu Park (FSU); Richard Liang (FSU); and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jianjun Shi.

Yue was also a finalist for the Quality, Statistics & Reliability Best Refereed Paper Award for “Effective Model Calibration via Sensible Variable Identification and Adjustment, with Application to Composite Fuselage Simulation,” in collaboration with Rui Tuo (ISyE visiting assistant professor); Jeffrey Hunt (Boeing); Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jianjun Shi; and Yan Wang (ISyE visiting scholar).

It’s common for friends and family to come together to celebrate milestone birthdays. For the Stewart School’s George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor, and Arkadi Nemirovski, John Hunter Chair and professor, more than 200 people traveled from across the globe to convene in Atlanta for a birthday celebration unlike all others: NemFest, a two-day optimization conference held May 11-12, 2017, at Georgia Tech’s Historic Academy of Medicine. Leading experts in the field, colleagues, and students gathered for Nemirovski’s 70th birthday and Nemhauser’s 80th birthday, celebrating what the organizers called a collective “150 years of contributions to optimization.”

It is not an overstatement to say that the two colleagues and friends have made an extraordinary impact on their specialties within optimization, and as a result have advanced not only the field, but also ISyE and Georgia Tech.

Unexpected Paths

Neither Nemhauser, a native of the Bronx, New York, nor Nemirovski, a native of Moscow, Russia, ever expected that they would land in Atlanta or at Georgia Tech.

What Lies Ahead

Nemhauser and Nemirovski continue to actively make seminal contributions to their ever-developing fields. Describing emerging areas of optimization, Nemhauser said, “The issues that we are still struggling with are how to deal with uncertainty. You don’t know all the data when you try to optimize something.

“The second big area that is emerging is what’s called online optimization. More and more, we are getting into issues where we have to make decisions in real time. Think of the driverless car. That means you’re not going to have much time at all to optimize, because you’re going to look at the data and maybe a second later, you have to make a decision. Those are the two biggest problems, together with the problem that happens all the time: As we are able to solve bigger problems and solve them faster, more problems keep coming that will get bigger and bigger, and you need solutions faster and faster.”

Looking ahead, Nemhauser is also interested in focusing on the fundamental problem that first got him involved in integer programming: political districting, which is dividing a state into districts based on a set of criteria.

Currently, Nemirovski is working on the first-order algorithm he developed in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to machine learning and extending that into statistics. He said, “I’m trying to bridge convex optimization theory with statistics,” which has important implications for high-dimensional statistics.

NemFest: A Once in a Lifetime Event

The idea of NemFest was conceived by Nemhauser’s and Nemirovski’s ISyE colleagues as a way to celebrate their significant contributions and discuss current research activities in discrete and continuous optimization.

By all accounts, NemFest was special. Boland described the two-day workshop as a “once in a lifetime event” that was a celebration of “what great people Nemhauser and Nemirovski are and how they have grown and shaped the field.”

To appreciate the international reach and influence of Nemhauser and Nemirovski, you only need to look at who attended NemFest. From undergraduate and graduate students to young faculty to leading experts, attendees as well as speakers and panelists represented major research universities from across the nation and the world. Participants traveled from distances across the United States in addition to Canada, Israel, and several countries in Europe.

Sun said, “It was probably one of the most significant optimization conferences, just judging from the speakers—a who’s who in optimization for both continuous and discrete optimization—and also the number of attendants. I think it will have a lasting impact on everyone who was there.”

The speakers discussed some of the ways in which they have collaborated with Nemhauser or Nemirovski over the years, as well as their current research activities. The first day included a panel comprised of current and previous colleagues of Nemhauser for a discussion on reflections of his work; the second day ended with a panel discussion on Nemirovski and his contributions.

Describing the event, ISyE Associate Professor Santanu Dey said, “NemFest was very personal for a lot of us. It was a way of saying thank you, and it was so inspirational to listen to their life stories and the kind of things that they have done. George and Arkadi are truly giants in their fields, and have started areas that have made a great impact on people all over the world.”

What did the honorees think of NemFest? Nemhauser said, “As a scientific conference, it was very high quality, and of course, it was great just having all my friends back. It was extremely well done, and I enjoyed it a lot.”

“I very much appreciate those people who organized it,” said Nemirovksi. “And I am extremely thankful for them and for those who came.” True to his humble nature, he added, “It would be good to celebrate something different.”

Beyond Their Legendary Careers: Getting to Know George Nemhauser and Arkadi Nemirovski

Beyond their legendary careers and achievements are two people who are equally renowned for their personalities. Nem- hauser is famous for his sense of humor and his personable nature. An avid sports fan, he dedicated his second book (with Robert Garfinkel), Integer Programming, to the New York Knicks basketball team.

Nemirovski, too, has a dry wit and a humble, kind nature. He used to write poetry and has even authored a play. Coincidentally, the two colleagues are neighbors and live on the same block in midtown Atlanta. Here they share more about their lives and interests.

On spare time

Nemhauser: “My wife and I for years would go on organized hikes, hiking in a pleasant way all around the world. Probably the most exciting place we hiked in was Bhutan and some other places around Europe. Travel has been a very big part of our lives. I’m a sports fan, and I’m also a wine collector. I have a serious cellar of wines that I enjoy drinking.”

Nemirovski: “This is something I struggle with. In my spare time, I do what I do here — work.”

On advice for students interested in entering academia

Nemirovski: “I believe they should do what is interesting to them. Their immediate role is to master some set of skills which is important today … they should realize that this knowledge will serve them for their entire lives.”

Favorite book

Nemirovski: “The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I know it more or less by heart and have read it in both Russian and English.”

Proudest  achievement

Nemhauser: “Personally, what I’m most proud of is that I have been married to the same woman for almost 58 years, and my wife has had a lot to do with my success. That’s been a very big thing in my life.”

Building on NemFest

Extending the momentum of NemFest, the Stewart School is organizing and hosting additional workshops that celebrate ISyE’s strengths in both theory and applications in order to explore new areas of research and collaboration with industry, focusing on areas such as machine learning, health care, and energy, where industrial engineering and operations research can make a difference.

The first of these follow-up events was the Workshop on Electric Energy Systems and Optimization, hosted by ISyE on November 9-10, 2017. To address the challenges in electric energy systems, multidisciplinary research is needed to make fundamental breakthroughs. The workshop was an initial step toward building a platform for researchers, practitioners, and students from electric energy systems and operations research to come together for discussions on challenges facing the nation’s electric systems. Consisting of research talks, presentations, and a panel discussion, topics focused on dealing with uncertainty in power systems; new ways to solve complex optimization problems in power system operations and planning; data analytics for power systems; and how to promote collaborations between academia and the energy industry.

In announcing Nemirovski’s election to the prestigious organization, the NAE commended him for his work in “developing efficient algorithms for large-scale convex optimization problems.”

Nemirovski was the only professor from Georgia Tech to be chosen for the honor this year.

“Arkadi is a world-renowned leader in his field and has profoundly influenced generations in the areas of discrete and continuous optimization. This highest of distinctions reflects his unparalleled contributions to convex optimization, which have shaped the field,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “Arkadi represents the best of the Stewart School’s deep, longstanding emphasis on theoretical research. We couldn’t be more proud of him.”

Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions bestowed on an engineer. According to the NAE, membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature,” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

“I am delighted that Arkadi’s extraordinary career has been richly rewarded with induction into the National Academy of Engineering,” said Gary S. May, dean and Southern Company Chair, College of Engineering. “He has been a pioneer in his field, and this honor is testament to his research work and accomplishments.”

Nemirovski earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics (1974) from Moscow State University; his Doctor of Sciences in Mathematics (1990) from the Supreme Attestation Board at the USSR Council of Ministers; and his Doctor of Mathematics (Honoris Causa) from the University of Waterloo, Canada (2009). He joined ISyE in 2005.

Upon hearing the news of his NAE election, Nemirovski said, “I am extremely lucky and happy to be a member of our fantastic ISyE community, and I am greatly indebted to my colleagues for 12 years of a wonderful working experience.”

Nemirovski and other newly elected members will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting on October 8, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

Nemirovski joins other ISyE faculty who are already members of the NAE, including A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics Jeff Wu, Regent’s Professor Emeritus H. Donald Ratliff, Professor Emeritus William Rouse, and Professor Emeritus Ellis Johnson.

“The 31 spring 2017 Senior Design projects involved 234 students and 10 faculty advisors. The projects served a broad range of clients, from manufacturing, operations, logistics, warehousing, energy, financial systems, hospitals, online business, retail, and government. Several teams explored solutions involving new technologies, including crowd-sourcing delivery services, drone delivery of urgent orders, online collaboration services, and blue-tooth tracking of medical staff and patients,” said Leon McGinnis, professor emeritus and Senior Design coordinator.

“Every team provided significant value to their client, and a significant fraction of teams projected benefits valued at six or seven figures,” continued McGinnis. “As always, it was an intense and important learning experience for the students. The difficulty in narrowing down to four finalists for the ISyE Best of Senior Design is a testament to the high expectations, tough standards, and overall outstanding quality of our graduating seniors.”

The 31 teams presented their projects at the spring 2017 Capstone Expo on April 18, 2017. Out of this group, four teams — CDC Contact Tracing, CDC Smoke, Emory Discharge, and MBUSA Drone – were chosen as finalists to compete in the ISyE Best of Senior Design on May 3. Team MBUSA Drone was selected as the first-place winner.

Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA) engaged the MBUSA Drone team to identify how drone delivery could be valuably introduced as the first same-day part ordering option for its dealerships. The team designed a drone delivery solution to reduce part delivery time and loaner car cost and developed a coverage optimization model to determine the optimal locations to hold the drones and parts eligible for drone delivery.

MBUSA will be able to leverage the model's user interface to modify key parameters, including associated costs and drone capabilities, and view updated model results as well as their respective net present value. Implementing such a drone delivery solution will allow MBUSA to gain a first-mover advantage, an increase in customer satisfaction, and cost savings.

According to team leader Vikrant Jain, MBUSA will continue to build on the foundation created by the team’s delivery, with the ultimate goal of implementing drone delivery in the future. “Our project, from an IE perspective, was particularly unique,” Jain noted. “Our objective was not to simply improve a current process but rather to design a specific new process to valuably introduce drone delivery into the MBUSA's current part distribution system.”

The team presented two unique recommendations based on highest returns and highest shipments replaced, respectively.

If MBUSA implements a drone delivery system based on highest returns, they will realize a net present value of $66,414 with a total of 9,887 referral part shipments replaced. If MBUSA implements the alternative recommendation based on replacing the most shipments, they will realize a net present value of $15,729 with a total of 10,172 referral part shipments replaced. Replacing more referral part shipments will translate to greater delivery time savings, resulting in greater customer satisfaction – a factor not included in net present value.

“We could not have partnered with a better Senior Design team for our project,” said Angela Lee, who is a network support specialist for MBSUA Parts Logistics. “The team was professional and determined to exceed expectations on every level. They have set the bar high for all who participate in the Senior Design program going forward. It was exciting to engage in such a successful partnership this semester, and we look forward to continuing this partnership.”

In addition to Jain, team members included Ram Bhutani, Stephen Murphey, Ryan Rodwell, Austin Proctor, Alvin Tight, and Yanyang Zhao. They were advised by Associate Professor Santanu Dey.

Team CDC Contact Tracing developed a decision support tool to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identify infected airline passengers during contact tracing investigations. Taking in pathogen and flight parameters, this novel application returns a transmission-risk model and analyzes alternative protocols. The application's versatility enables comprehensive scenario coverage, and its back-end allows for continuous improvement by health authorities nationwide. If the CDC adopts the revised protocol, the organization could save up to $300,000 per flight.

Team members included Jason Bermudez, Kevin Desprez, Alexander Kehres, Chungjae Lee, Leah Patterson, Suphaphat Petlerkwong, and Yuntong Zhu. They were advised by William W. George Chair and Professor Pinar Keskinocak.

Team CDC Smoke worked with the CDC to support a recent policy by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Effective February 3rd, 2017, all 1.3 million public housing units must go “smoke-free” within 18 months.

The team created a targeted approach to smoking cessation by estimating smoking prevalence within the public units, calculating the return-on-investment (ROI) of each cessation intervention at a granular level, and prioritizing recommendations that yield the highest returns. They also developed a tool, EXTINGUISH, that visualizes relevant data in order to help better utilize resources to connect smokers to cessation resources.

The values of the project include greater efficiency for health departments, better connections between agencies and cessation resources, and increased support of smokers wanting to quit. With this project, the team identified approximately $12 to $582 million dollars in savings (approximately six percent to 20 percent in cost reductions) for the stakeholders for different smoking cessation interventions.

Team members included Aaron Ahn, Kristie Choe, Vishal Mummigatti, Connor Owen, Jose Rodriguez, Diem Tran, Divya Vedula, and Jiali Zhao. They were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

Team Emory Discharge designed process changes and developed a unique tiered discharge procedure precipitating patient departure time from Emory Midtown Hospital. The team also implemented an expedited taxi arrangement, which indicated the viability of solutions with increased patient uptake throughout the pilot.

By facilitating patient flow, solutions are shown to reduce diversion by 2.6 percent, cut boarding times by 30 minutes, and allow Emory to serve 63 more ambulance arrivals per year.

Financially, the project yields a $306,000 increase in annual revenue and a $1.1 million net present value, while also increasing patient quality of care.

Team members included Samuel Curtsinger, Dylan Floyd, Joshua Kulas, Sean Monahan, Derek Nalodka, Emily Smith, Rachel Thorne, and Phillip Vetrano. They were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

During the spring 2017 Capstone Expo, a panel ISyE alumni judges chose two teams as the ISyE winners: Team CDC Contact Tracing (see above) and Team Equifax.

The Equifax Credit Marketing Services (CMS) team creates customer information reports for client marketing efforts. The CMS team had concerns with the lack of standardization in their current staffing and project assignment process. In fact, CMS has delivered 32 percent of projects late, or past the client committed date, over the past two years. 

Team Equifax created a labor allocation tool to help CMS efficiently assign employees to projects. In addition, they conducted a general process improvement to reduce total project completion time by implementing process manuals and training. Their tool and process improvement reduced late project percentage by nine percent, which opens opportunity for $5.5 million in additional revenue for CMS.

Team members included Divya Achtani, Shivum Agrawal, Maria Auslander, Yeji Lee, Jihwan Oh, Srida Saraogi, and Anju Suresh. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

 Along with serving as the George Chair, Keskinocak is also the Advance Professor for the College of Engineering; the associate director of research for the Health Systems Institute, and the co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. Before joining the ISyE faculty in 1999, Keskinocak also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Her research focuses on applications of operations research and management science with societal impact (particularly health and humanitarian applications) and supply chain management, with an emphasis on resource allocation, revenue management, production planning/scheduling, and logistics/transportation. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1991 and 1992, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997.

Kim Kurtis, who has served as CoE’s associate dean for faculty development and scholarship since 2014, has been named interim chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, effective July 1, while a search for a new school chair is being conducted.

“Pinar will do an outstanding job in her new role as interim associate dean for the College of Engineering, and we are grateful to her for stepping into this complex and important role,” said May. “We look forward to Pinar’s leadership in this area .”

For a number of recent graduates of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech, the experience has provided a springboard for successful academic careers at colleges and universities across the country. Some have remained in industrial engineering disciplines while others have obtained positions teaching business, underscoring the versatility of an ISyE education at Georgia Tech.

In the stories presented here, ISyE alumni comment on their career paths and some of the people who influenced them along the way.

Connecting Research and Practice

Kris Johnson Ferreira (BSIE 07) might not be indulging her passion for teaching and research were it not for the encouragement of Associate Professor Joel Sokol, one of her undergraduate industrial engineering professors at ISyE.

“I’d never really thought about getting a Ph.D. and what life would be like as an academic until Joel brought it up as a possibility,” said Ferreira, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “He told me about his experience getting a Ph.D. and what it was like to be a professor and what he enjoyed the most about it. I knew from talking to him that I would love the teaching and research aspects, and that definitely helped me make the decision to get a Ph.D. and go into academia.”

She was among a cohort of undergraduates who assisted Sokol with his well-known research in the application of data analytics to build predictive models of the NCAA men’s basketball tournaments.

The decision to apply to Georgia Tech was a “no brainer,” she continued. “It has the best IE program in the country with amazing students and faculty from around the world.”

After Tech, she spent three years working as a consultant before enrolling at MIT, where she earned a doctorate in operations research in 2015. Later that year, she joined the Harvard faculty.

“I really love teaching,” she said, “and Harvard Business School has a lot of resources to help new faculty succeed in the classroom.”

Another plus is that Harvard Business School offers the freedom to perform new research and apply industrial engineering to a variety of business applications, said Ferreira.

“I work in partnership with companies and use their data to help them make better revenue-management decisions, and I really enjoy this connection between research and practice.”

A President’s Scholar at Tech, Ferreira’s awards include a Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and an MIT Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Engineering Systems Teaching.

As for the future, she said that you never know what opportunities will come along, but right now, “I really love my job. I’m following my path and passion and doing what I love to do.”

Toriello’s thesis advisor was A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser, whom he credits with invaluable guidance not only through five years of doctoral studies, but also for sharing consider- able insight into the nuts and bolts of an academic career.

“George was always available with an open ear and always found time to give me professional advice, and advice on strategizing and other aspects of enter- ing academia. He’s truly a fountain of knowledge in those regards.”

Ph.D. in hand, in 2010 Toriello accepted an offer from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles as an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering. It was a wonderful experience, he said, but three years later, when the opportunity arose to join the Georgia Tech ISyE faculty, “I jumped at it.

“The professional opportunities offered by Georgia Tech are tremendous as is the Stewart School’s reputation in industrial engineering,” he explained, “so I couldn’t resist coming back and joining these people I know well and regard so highly.

“I joke sometimes that I’m like a bad cold — they can’t get rid of me,” he laughed.

Toriello notices a difference between the students he teaches and his own time as an ISyE undergrad in that the former are even better prepared for success in the classroom and beyond.

“Our students are very well-rounded and bring a much wider breadth of experience and skill sets,” he said. “They are really impressive in that regard, so it’s quite heartening to interact with our students.”

The recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, Toriello reached a professional milestone this past summer when he was awarded tenure. His next step is promotion to full professor.

“I’ll continue to do work in my field and aim for a major research break- through,” added Toriello, whose research interests encompass transportation, logistics, and operations, as well as related topics in mathematical optimization.

“There are exceptional people on both sides at ISyE, and they’re working together all the time.”

Two professors in particular stand out for Luedtke: George Nemhauser and Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed.

“I had co-advising with them,” he elaborated. “George has a very high-level, broad vision of the IE field, and that was very beneficial for me. Shabbir worked with me ‘in the weeds’ a little more with some difficult research questions. To have had both of them as mentors was a unique opportunity, and I was very happy to have had that chance.”

Helping Students Thrive

Linwei Xin (MS MATH 10, Ph.D. OR15) calls his transfer to ISyE “one of the best decisions I have made in my life.”

Two years into his doctoral work in mathematics at Tech, he switched to operations research.

“I wanted to see how to apply my knowledge of pure math to solve real-world problems,” explained Xin, a 2008 graduate of Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, where he earned a bachelor’s in mathematics. “ISyE has world-wide esteemed faculty in operations research and many outstanding students, and I thrived quickly in this environment. Without this decision to study operations research, I might not have ended up in academia.”

Xin is an assistant professor of operations management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He joined the Chicago faculty in July 2017 following a two-year stint as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois.

“Academia means more freedom,” he said. “Basically I am working for myself.

“I love conducting research, and especially love proving theorems and writing academic papers,” he added. “I also like teaching. I can reach many students at a university, and when I see their academic improvement, I feel that I’ve accomplished something impactful.”

An ongoing objective is to “see my students thrive, graduate, and have successful careers.”

Xin credits a measure of his own career success to guidance and advice from his professors in operations research, the advanced operations research courses he took, and interaction with his Ph.D. peers at Tech. In particular, Xin points to ISyE Professor Alexander Shapiro and Adjunct Associate Professor David Goldberg as playing key roles in his development as a researcher.

“I was very fortunate and honored to work with them on several exciting research topics during my Ph.D. studies,” he said. “I am extremely grateful for their dedication, generosity, and patience, and I learned tremendously from them.”

Xin’s honors include a Chinese Scholars Association for Management Science and Engineering Best Paper Award, first place in the INFORMS George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition, second place in the INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition, and finalist in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Student Paper Competition. He also won an NSF grant as a principal investigator.

The Master of Science in Supply Chain Engineering (MSSCE) is a graduate degree program created to meet growing demand for business-savvy engineers who can design and synchronize highly-complex global supply chains. The program began in fall 2010 with an initial cohort of 12 transfer students from Panama. The first full class began in fall 2011, with 46 students who graduated in 2012. The program now graduates about 50 students each year, with approximately 275 program alumni as of summer 2017.

In August 2016, Amazon partnered with Georgia Tech and ISyE to introduce the MSSCE Systems Design track. The Systems Design track is designed to provide students with a deeper knowledge of designing systems both within the walls of a logistics facility and across facilities in a complex, ever-changing supply chain network. With $665,000 in funding over five years, the Systems Design track includes courses in mechatronics and robotics through Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, ranked second nationally, as well as a course in industrial systems design.

The Amazon partnership funds four fellowships per year for students, who also receive priority for Amazon internships. The eight fellowship recipients thus far include an international contingent — one from Mexico, one from Belgium, and three from India — as well as two students from the U.S. Half of the recipients are female.

ISyE also is partially home to the new Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMSA). The OMSA, Georgia Tech’s second degree-at-scale, was announced in January 2017 on the edX platform. A collaboration between the Scheller College of Business and the Colleges of Engineering and Computing, the program is produced by Georgia Tech Professional Education and is offered for less than $10,000 tuition. Designed to be completed in one to two years, the OMSA offers the same interdisciplinary curriculum as the on-campus program, leveraging Georgia Tech’s strengths in statistics, operations research, computing, and business.

The first OMSA cohort began in August 2017, welcoming approximately 300 adult learners of which 26 percent have graduate degrees. The average age of this first cohort is 34, and 47 percent of the candidates are Georgia residents. This summer, Georgia Tech and edX also launched an Analytics MicroMasters© Program. The program has over 13,500 learners, 169 of which are in the verified track, progressing toward a completion certificate.

The machine learning (ML) Ph.D. program is a collaborative venture between Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences through the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, an Interdisciplinary Research Center that is both a home for thought leaders and a training ground for the next generation of pioneers.

The ML Ph.D. began in August 2017. The initial class has 19 students, all drawn from incoming and current PhD. students from eight schools across three colleges at Georgia Tech: the Schools of Computational Science and Engineering, Computer Science, and Interactive Computing in the College of Computing; the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and ISyE in the College of Engineering; and the School of Mathematics in the College of Sciences.

ML Ph.D. students are required to complete courses in five different areas: mathematical foundations, intermediate statistics, machine learning theory and methods, data models, and optimization. They are also required to take 15 hours of electives chosen from at least two of the following: statistics and applied probability, advanced theory, applications, computing and optimization, and platforms.

With the recent availability of new antiviral drugs, individuals with hepatitis C can achieve cure of their disease. Several organizations, including the National Academy of Medicine and the World Health Organization, are considering the possibility of hepatitis C elimination as a public health threat, but several barriers exist. These include lack of effective screening policies, exorbitant costs associated with scaling-up screening and treatment to a large portion of the population, and the rising incidence of hepatitis C, especially among young people who inject drugs.

Supported by the Directorates for Engineering and Computer and Information Science and Engineering through the Smart and Connected Health initiative, the National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant over four years to a team of researchers to study the elimination of hepatitis C in the United States. The interdisciplinary research team is comprised of Turgay Ayer, George Family Foundation assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering; Jagpreet Chhatwal, decision scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Anne Spaulding, associate professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and an infectious disease physician in the Department of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine. 

This collaborative research aims to use innovative methods from operations research to answer policy-relevant questions that could lead to hepatitis C elimination in the United States. The research will address questions such as: How should state Medicaid programs expand hepatitis C screening and treatment under their constrained budgets; what kind of screening policy should be implemented for the general population; and how would investments in high-risk groups such as people in prisons reduce hepatitis C transmission.

The interdisciplinary team will also develop practical decision-support tools for implementation and use by the stakeholders. To facilitate implementation, the researchers will partner with the Department of Health and Human Services, state and county health departments, and prison policymakers, who are the potential stakeholders of the proposed solutions and tools.

Ultimately, this innovative project has the potential to substantially reduce HCV disease burden, eventually leading to its elimination by 2030.

“NSF is pleased to support innovative, multidisciplinary research teams as they address key national challenges, such as control over debilitating diseases like hepatitis C,” said Georgia-Ann Klutke, National Science Foundation Program Director for Operations Engineering, which funds the research. “While highly successful antiviral treatments are available, eliminating the disease requires a cost-effective allocation of resources for screening and treatment.”

“Many of the pressing healthcare problems faced today are too complicated for a single academic discipline to consider and tackle,” said Ayer. “This is an exemplary interdisciplinary collaborative research effort drawing upon the expertise from several disciplines, including mathematical modeling and data analytics, public health and policy, hepatology, and correctional health; and with the holistic and innovative perspective we take, our hope is to facilitate and improve decision-making in managing the hepatitis C epidemic worldwide.”

Describing the impact of the research, Chhatwal said, “By providing decision-support tools, we believe the proposed research can aid policymakers in making policy decisions that will bring us closer to hepatitis C elimination in the United States.”

“I have been taking care of patients with hepatitis C for two decades, in both correctional facilities and the community,” added Spaulding. “We can study how addressing hepatitis C in each setting contributes to eliminating this curable disease.”   

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1722614, 1722665, and 1722906.

When he first taught the class, he brought in a few group activities and games — for example, using Vernier calipers to measure bolts of different lengths, and then applying data analysis techniques to evaluate the measurement process.

But the class was really a traditionally structured course, as Paynabar recently reflected. “What do you do in a traditional classroom?” he asked. “The teacher lectures while the students listen, take notes, then go home and complete exercises.”

By using the traditional model, Paynabar was unable to incorporate as many engaging activities as he wanted to. So in spring 2017, when he had the opportunity to teach BSM again, he decided to try an increasingly popular teaching model called “flipping the classroom.”

In the flipped classroom, the students watched an instructional video created by Paynabar prior to class. When the class met, the students applied what they learned from the video by working in pairs to complete hands-on learning activities such as group quizzes and games. These interactive activities represented real-world problems that could be solved via the statistical theories and methods the students learned on their own time.

For his flipped class, Paynabar created engaging in-class activities, one of which included a comparison study of National Basketball Association stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. After compiling several years of performance data for the two professional basketball players, the students completed the comparison using hypothesis testing, focusing on three-point shots to determine which player had the best performance.

For another activity, the students used the statistics for the Atlanta Braves baseball team to determine whether there was a difference in the team’s scores for home versus away games.

The students also applied their skills to a study of M&Ms, comparing the number of red versus yellowcandies to determine whether the two colors were present in statistically proportional numbers. (And then they ate the candy, of course.)

Although flipped classroom instruction requires more effort and time on both the part of the instructor and the students, Paynabar said that the experience was worth it. When he surveyed the students at the end of the semester, 71 percent of the class said they preferred the flipped style over the traditional style of instruction. In addition, when Paynabar compared the results of the first exam of the flipped classroom versus the traditional, on average flipped classroom scores were 10 points higher. “So that shows the effectiveness of the flipped classroom,” he said.

Paynabar plans to continue flipping classrooms in future courses he teaches, including Basic Statistical Methods in the spring 2018 semester.

The way Damon P. Williams (BSIE 02) tells it, he was destined to come to Georgia Tech — and destined to return years after he graduated. A Maryland native, Williams was a high school senior when he first considered engineering for his college major. This meant, he reflected in a recent interview, choosing between the “two best engineering schools in the country: northward to MIT and southward to Georgia Tech.”

It was 1998, two short years after the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, and Georgia Tech’s campus had been spiffed up to welcome the world. Williams remembered touring the Institute, seeing the brand-new dorms and swimming pool, and becoming enamored with the campus. “Georgia Tech was where I wanted to go,” he said. And industrial engineering was a natural fit, because he’s always been the type of person interested in solving problems and improving on solutions.

While an undergraduate student at the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), he completed two co-ops for a company that manufactured cell phones. Williams’ co-op experiences were enlightening, to say the least, as he became disheartened by the company’s “get it done as fast as possible” approach to solving problems, which favored employees who came up with quick solutions, regardless of whether the solutions were the right ones.

These experiences eventually led Williams to the realization that he wanted to stay in academia. After graduating from Tech, he went on to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for his M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial engineering.

In Michigan, Williams’ career path took what some might consider to be an unusual turn: In 2006, while working on his Ph.D., he entered the Christian ministry. After Williams finished his dissertation, his pastor told him it was time for him to go to seminary.

What brought Williams back to Atlanta is ultimately what brought him back to ISyE, where he is now a lecturer and advisor in the academic office. He enrolled in a small Presbyterian seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary, in Decatur, Georgia. After his experiences with two large universities — Tech and Michigan — for his industrial engineering degrees, Williams was looking for a program that could offer an intimate community.

Seminary demanded skills that William hadn’t used since early in his undergraduate career. “My brain is wired for math and science,” he said, laughing. “Seminary was a lot of group work, a lot of reading, a lot of writing. I hadn’t written a paper outside my dissertation since English class my freshman year. Doing so much writing was difficult for me, and I decided to do something that would take me back to my Ph.D.”

Williams reached out to then-ISyE School Chair Chip White (now the Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics), who had also been a professor at Michigan during William’s time there, to find out if there were any teaching opportunities within the School. White directed him to Chen Zhou, the associate chair for undergraduate studies, who immediately contacted Williams about teaching. The School was beginning to admit a larger number of ISyE majors, and as a result, needed to hire additional lecturers.

Williams agreed to teach two ISyE undergraduate courses, took a part-time post-doctoral appointment with Tech’s then-Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), and continued with his seminary studies until he graduated with his master’s degree in divinity in 2012. “I like my plate to be full,” Williams said.

As Williams was about to graduate from Columbia, the pastor of his Atlanta church asked him, “Do you think you’re ready to lead a church?”

“Because I was a good Baptist associate minister,” Williams remembered, “I did as I was told and applied for the senior pastoral position at Providence Missionary Baptist Church,” which is a large, historic African American church in southwest Atlanta.

“There was no way they were going to hire me,” added Williams. “At the time I wasn’t married, I didn’t have any pastoring experience, I wasn’t ordained, and I had not yet graduated seminary when I applied. Top people in the field were applying for the job.” But over the next eight months, Williams went through the application and interview process, and Providence Missionary called him to be their pastor in September 2012.

At this point, Williams had three jobs: serving as senior pastor, as an instructor for ISyE, and as a full-time assistant director of CETL. He resigned from CETL but continued teaching for ISyE. He explained, “I love teaching, I love students, I love the ‘ah-ha!’ experience. I love taking a student who doesn’t think they can do it and really motivating and encouraging them and showing them they can succeed.”

Williams’ weekly schedule is packed: Sunday is a work day, with two church services and Sunday School in between. He spends Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings teaching early ISyE classes, then heads directly to his church from campus. Wednesday afternoons are spent at multiple church-related activities; Thursdays and Fridays are generally for sermon preparation; and Saturdays are for any church- or ISyE-related work. In between shuttling from ISyE to church activities, Williams reserves blocks of time to spend with his wife and 21-month-old son.

“Then the week starts over again on Sunday,” Williams reflected. “It’s a seven-day-a-week workweek. But the old adage is true: ‘If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.’”

Currently, Williams teaches three ISyE undergraduate classes: Operations Analysis (ISYE 3104), which is a breadth engineering elective; Introduction to Probability (ISYE 2027), which is required for all ISyE students; and Probability & Statistics (ISYE 3770), which is for non-ISyE majors. As an advisor for ISyE, he also has recently added student success initiatives — such as study techniques and time management — to his roster, specifically focusing on ISyE students who are struggling in their classes. He aims to increase students’ capacity for academic success.

“We have the best professors at the best college and the best resources. So students should get the best education,” Williams said. “If they’re not, I want to slide in there and figure out what can be done to make sure they’re getting the best education and the best experience.”

When asked if his two roles complement one another, Williams agrees. “At ISyE I study how to optimize large-scale systems. What is a church? A church is a large-scale system in a community. It has to be optimized and improved. People’s lives have to be improved; people’s relationships have to be improved. Are people widgets? Absolutely not. But can I apply some of the principles that I teach and have learned from my engineering degrees to create better solutions for my church? Yes.

“And then, my students find out I’m a pastor, and they show up at my church to hear me preach. I’ll see them sitting out there in the congregation. There’s definitely overlap — but not because I’m ministering to the students when I step on campus. I’m very aware to keep the two roles separate. But our society has some significant problems, and these millennials who I teach are going to get out there and solve those problems. So I’d better teach them well and love on them hard so they get out there and want to fix health care or our international relations with other countries, for example.”

Williams is passionate about building relationships with the people who cross his path. “Whether I’m on campus or at church, loving people is universal. I feel like I have two churches: a congregation in southwest Atlanta, and every semester — as they rotate through — a congregation of ISyE students. And I care about people and love on people and pour into people.”

Her Georgia Tech resume clearly demonstrates her role as a campus leader – FASET Orientation leader and cabinet member, intern at General Electric and Porsche, Student Government Association committee chair, Georgia Tech Student Ambassador, Ms. Georgia Tech contestant Ramblin' Reck club member and on and on.

In 2015 she was selected to attend the Atlantic Coast Conference Student Leadership Symposium, and was a Georgia Tech tour guide.

“The best thing about Georgia Tech is that it has provided me a space to grow and figure out what I want to do with my life,” Min said. “It’s also provided me with endless opportunities to pursue my goals.”

“The decision is never easy,” said John Vande Vate, professor and Senior Design coordinator. “Many teams showed real brilliance in tackling very challenging problems. Congratulations to these remarkable young people, and many thanks to their advisors who helped them accomplish so much so well.”

Team Bacon ‘n’ Eggs partnered with client Waffle House to identify areas in which their maintenance handling system could be improved. The goal of the project was to help Waffle House uphold their commitment to serving customers 24/7/365 by reducing the frequency, duration, and impact of breakdowns inside units. Their work consisted of several deliverables that together can achieve this goal.

First, the team increased the preparedness of technicians in order to expedite time to service and limit breakdown duration. They accomplished this goal by: 1) reassigning technicians geographically to reduce travel time to and from units, and 2) by restructuring the maintenance van inventory model to limit the number of stockout instances upon arrival to units. These two initiatives combined will reduce the duration of breakdowns by seven percent and recapture over 30,000 productive labor hours that can be allocated to increased preventative maintenance.

Next, the team reprioritized preventative maintenance routines to ensure more frequent attention to critical appliances inside of units; this work will reduce the frequency of breakdowns by 11 percent.

Finally, the team partnered with a third-party maintenance application to pilot a digitized version of the current paper maintenance reporting system. With this application, Waffle House will be able to track the frequency and duration of breakdowns across the system to establish a maintenance culture around performance.

“We were very impressed with the high level of professionalism of the Senior Design team throughout the process,” said Louis Todd, vice president of equipment at Waffle House. “They helped us to identify process improvements in several major areas of our equipment maintenance function. These improvements will speed up our response times, shorten equipment down time, and reduce our overall maintenance spend. This team, as we like to say at Waffle House, really scattered, smothered, and covered the challenge we gave them. This was a huge homerun.” 

The Bacon ‘n’ Eggs team included Roshan Balakrishnan, Melina Blasetti, Christopher Bush, Hasit Dewan, Scott Larson, Nicholas Rogstad, Rikhil Shah, and Viral Shah. They were advised by ISyE Lecturer Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Team Emory Quality Metrics created a trusted performance benchmarking system. This solution will allow Emory Healthcare to assess its surgeons’ performances and more easily identify parts of their system where they can add value either by improving quality of care or decreasing excess costs. The team utilized the combination of financial and qualitative data from procedures to create linear and logistic regressions that provide a reliable foundation for benchmarking that physicians can trust. These models allowed for an in-depth look at predictors for four critical procedures: colectomies, ventral hernias, carotid endarterectomies, and hepatectomies, and their effect on dozens of different response variables, including direct variable cost, readmission rates, patient length of stay (days between the procedure and discharge), and return to operating room rates.

The annual opportunity in potential cost savings identified was $1.43 million, and the opportunity for potential length of stay reductions identified was 940 staying days per year. While this information provided analytics tailored to Emory Healthcare’s patient population, the team established an effective way to communicate this information with the Emory Healthcare community of the Project Management Office (PMO), physicians, administrators, and nurse navigators.

 An additional goal of the team was to provide an interface that would allow Emory Healthcare to continue to gain insights by drilling down on risk-adjusted surgeon performance, identifying opportunities for value-add by category, and showing which predictors have the greatest effect on the outcome.

Their work will be implemented into the design phase of future Value Acceleration Projects (VAPs) at Emory Healthcare that aim to improve quality and decrease costs. Next semester, this initiative will be passed off to a Georgia Tech team of masters students.

Team members on the Emory Quality Metrics project included Sarah Both, Matthew Creatore, Madeline Gaffney, Alice Jinks, Thomas Ross, Michael Senoo, Nathan Stefanick, and Brandon Wells. They were advised by Professor Renato Montiero.

Team Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s client was the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, where the NFL Atlanta Falcons and MLS Atlanta United both play. The project focused on the ways the food and beverage process affects the fan experience at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The team developed a standard queue design and an inventory forecasting tool, recommended signage and standard operating procedures, and conducted market research on the use of technology. Their work resulted in a 50 percent reduction in fan wait time throughout the stadium.

The Mercedes-Benz Stadium team members included Kevin Breslin, Lucy Bullen, Rohan Iyer, Valeria Rossi, Ethan Sailers, Elizabeth Swiger, and John Welch. They were also advised by Tokol-Goldsman.

Senior Design team Textron was selected as the ISyE Judges’ Choice at the Capstone Expo.

The group worked alongside Textron – an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technologies industrial conglomerate – to improve the throughput of their 660 Belt-Loader production facility in Kennesaw, Georgia. The team balanced the assembly line, as well as designed a system to minimize delays caused by late parts from support stations. These measures increased the maximum throughput of the assembly line by 0.25 vehicles/day, as well as a reduction of delays due to missing parts.

Textron team members included Scott Berry, Kerui Cui, Andre Evans, Zhejin Liu, Gordon Nail, Saneel Prabhu, Ji Qi, and Conor Tanzman. They were advised by Associate Professor Santanu Dey.

In the following interview, Ganju discusses WREK Radio’s history – the station will be celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2018, as well as how she came to be involved with WREK, and the specific policies and programs she’s been able to implement as station manager.

A longer version of this interview is also available as a podcast on SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/2j3u8OD.

What led you to Georgia Tech and to ISyE?

I’ve always loved Atlanta, so the opportunity to go to school in the best city ever and pursue an engineering degree from the best school ever was what originally led me to Georgia Tech.

I got into engineering with the notion that I could make current processes better. I actually started as a materials science engineer with the notion that that’s how I would do that, but then I discovered ISyE and realized it was exactly what I want to do.

What is WREK Radio?

WREK Radio is Georgia Tech’s student-run and -operated radio station. We’re one of the only stations in the U.S. whose students are also are engineers who work on the station. We became a station in March 1968, which means WREK will be celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2018. Before that, a group of engineers were illegally broadcasting out of Van Leer. But we are, according to the FCC, a radio station for 50 years in 2018.

Our engineering team has been working hard to break through technological barriers since 1968. We launched our first website in 1993, which is about two years before the internet started becoming what it is today. We simultaneously started broadcasting on the internet as another radio station on that day in August 1994. That’s kind of our claim to fame; it’s on Wikipedia.

Now we can reach almost all of Georgia, and we broadcast at almost 100,000 watts ERP – the maximum power level allowed by the FCC – on 91.1 FM.

What are you going to do to celebrate WREK’s 50^th anniversary?

We throw a show every year called Wrecktacular, and this year we’re making it bigger than ever. It’s going be festival-style, on April 6^th and 7^th, 2018, and we’re going to be doing it on a bigger scale than we usually do it – with bigger bands. I can’t reveal too many details yet, but it’s definitely something that the students of Georgia Tech should look out for. We’re really, really excited about it.

There will be music and the arts, a celebration of local Atlanta culture.

How did you personally come to be involved with WREK Radio?

A friend told me about it when I was in high school, and since I’m from the John’s Creek area, the air waves reached there. When I got here, I saw the [WREK] vault, which is a giant collection of music – the best of 50 years of music. It’s vinyl, CDs, and even reel-to-reels that have been accumulated. And when I walked in that room, I knew I was going to be here for the rest of my college career. I began as an operator in 2014, which is how everyone starts out.

What’s an operator?

It means that you are licensed to operate the boards; for example, the on-air studio is what’s actually going on air. So you can do that by yourself for any of our various programs, whether a specialty show or a regular rotation or sports.

You became WREK station manager this year. What policies and programs have you been able to implement that you’ve been most proud of?

Since it’s our 50^th anniversary, we’ve been trying to improve our connection with campus. We have a very rich history and have been an essential way for Georgia Tech to connect with the Atlanta community for the last 50 years. But not enough students know about that side of us, so we’d like to spread the message. Kurt Cobain visited here one time, and David Bowie was here. Sharing that history is a very cool thing.

And another thing we’ve been trying to do is create a better culture of inclusion, making the station a place where people can feel happy and can grow in their passion for music. We attract a wide variety of people, so it’s very high priority that everyone at the station gets the best out of the station.

When you’re not studying or you’re not at the station, how do you spend your time?

The way that any college student would spend their time: I go to a lot of concerts, hang out with my friends. I love reading, and I love trivia. Trivia is one of my recreational activities.

For the past two summers, Daniel Kurniawan, an ISyE senior, has had what might possibly be considered one of the coolest internships an industrial engineering student could have: He worked for SpaceX, the company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk (also of Tesla fame), with the ultimate goal of sending people to live on other planets.

As a high school senior, Kurniawan — who is originally from Maryland — visited Georgia Tech two days before his college decision was due. After his official campus tour, he and his family went to an Indonesian restaurant on Atlanta’s Buford Highway. It was there that he happened to meet Moorissa Tjokro (BSIE 14), an ISyE student who was about to graduate a few days later. As it turned out, Tjokro was a family friend from the Indonesian city where Kurniawan’s family originates.

In a recent interview, Kurniawan said he noticed throughout the course of their conversation how “Tjokro carried herself — I could tell she was an accomplished student, someone willing to go the extra mile to think of innovative approaches to the most complex problems.” This, he added, was what convinced him to come to Tech: “I felt that if this was the kind of person — the kind of leader — ISyE produces, that’s where I wanted to be. You could say I was drawn to ISyE first and to Georgia Tech second.”

Kurniawan has taken this attitude and perspective on leadership to his internships at SpaceX, where he has worked to develop a proof-of-concept for machine learning. In December 2017, he’ll join the company as a full-time employee after he graduates from Tech (in fewer than four years, in fact). And in addition to working for SpaceX, he’ll continue traveling the world. He has visited six continents and plans to check off the seventh — Antarctica — within the next few years.

For the last couple of years, you’ve been interested in data science and machine learning. What appeals to you so much about these fields?

There are infinite amounts of ways that you can solve machine-learning problems. At its heart, machine learning is simply teaching computers to learn. The idea is to use algorithms to decipher other patterns and correlations in a data set.

What I like so much about machine learning is that each problem has a different solution. I have never come across a situation where I’ve solved two problems the same exact way. Each problem requires in-depth analysis to understand what the data is saying, and as a result I found that even the most similar problems may have completely different approaches.

Another thing I like about machine learning is that nowadays I see applications of it everywhere. “Discover Weekly” on Spotify is essentially a recommender system that uses collaborative filtering to recommend a list of songs you may like based on similar user behavior. When you Google something, PageRank is used to rank websites in the search engine based on relevance and importance of sites. Facebook uses image detection to predict who is pictured in an uploaded photo. These are all examples of how machine learning is used in our everyday lives.

Interning for SpaceX is outside the typical ISyE industry or company. What led to your initial internship at SpaceX last year?

I happened to pass by SpaceX at their career fair booth while looking for my first internship my sophomore year. I quickly learned that this wasn’t a typical corporate job: SpaceX has big plans to reinvent space access, satellite telecommunications, and colonize Mars. I knew I would be working long hours, challenged with new problems, and faced with tight deadlines. I was sold knowing what kind of pressure and responsibility I would have in changing the future of humanity.

In the summer of 2016, I met Justin Hey (BSIE 16), a fellow ISyE student, and roomed with three other Georgia Tech interns. Georgia Tech is actually a primary target school for SpaceX recruiting.

What did you do in your first SpaceX internship, and how was your internship this past summer different?

Last year I worked in data analytics to support our production planning team. That role mainly involved mining and analyzing data to develop a strategy for outsourcing parts. In 2017, I took the lead in creating machine-learning applications for the business, which had me doing significantly more software development than last year.

At SpaceX, no matter what department you’re in, you’re part of the mission for getting to Mars and rocket reusability. Everything you do directly affects the rocket. This year’s project focused on meeting launch deadlines and ensuring that the rockets are safe. My project looked at potential problems — the rocket or the launch going wrong — and tried to resolve these before the launch. Machine learning in my department is very new — it was just myself and one other person — and we were pioneers trying to show use-value in its applications.

For many teams, the projects were all about making people’s lives easier. From a 2-D wearable sensor that makes it simple for runners to access their smartphone, to an app that provides a more transparent automotive service experience to car owners, student teams focused their energy on creating projects tailored to the customer. Two separate teams focused on the fan at the Mercedes-Benz and Braves stadiums in Atlanta, ensuring that game watchers could access food and beverages as efficiently as possible to enhance their game day experience. Another team helped customers coming into Home Depot find the exact screw they are looking for with a device that analyzes the screw type, removing shopping frustrations.

Other teams focused on enhancing the customer experience. Luxury car brands manufactured by GM had one team designing driver’s seats with sensors to increase the safety and comfort of commuters, ultimately delivering a higher quality driving experience. Mechanical engineering team members Doug Learnard and Golda Nguyen agreed that offering a novel car experience to drivers is a value add for customers when considering their buying options, and a tailored, personalized seat offers a better commute.  

At the end of the night there was a surprise in store for all competitors. For the first time in Capstone’s 10 year history, there was a tie for the overall winner. “Bacon and Eggs” and “Team 16 Emory Risk” shared the spotlight and $3,000 cash prize. Both teams were from ISyE.

“Bacon and Eggs” focused on system improvements for Waffle House to help the chain uphold their commitment to 24/7/365 quality customer service. The team optimized four areas for the restaurant, including restructuring the maintenance van inventory model, modifying geographic assignment of maintenance technicians, reprioritizing preventative maintenance procedures, and recommending a centralized maintenance management platform.

“Waffle house is one of those places where every time you go there, you can tell how much they care about their customers, and it’s really been an honor to help them out with that,” said Christopher Bush, ISyE. “All in all, winning feels like an absolutely amazing experience. Everyone talks about how hard it is for industrial teams to win Capstone, and we set out to defy that.”

For “Team 16 Emory Risk,” students focused on enabling doctors at Emory to provide better healthcare, upholding Emory’s value equation which is “Quality Over Cost.” The team combined Emory’s medical and financial data to provide physicians a way to better allocate their resources and inputs, such as medications and beds for patients.

“Our team is so excited to win, we are really honored to have worked with Emory Healthcare, which is an awesome client,” said Sarah Both, ISyE. “In fact, we had our final handoff meeting with Emory today, and they are incredibly excited and looking forward to implementing our work into their system to preserve resources and provide a better experience to patients.”  

Many student teams are poised to take their projects even further after Capstone, either applying for a patent or joining the CREATE-X program to take their business idea to market. And those focusing on the consumer have a distinct advantage in today’s business world that offers high reward to companies who invest in the customer experience.

2017 Fall Capstone Design Expo Winners

Overall winner – Tie

Bacon and Eggs - Waffle House maintenance handling system improvements

• Rikhil Shah, ISyE, Duluth GA
• Christopher Bush, ISyE, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
• Viral Shah, ISyE, Duluth, GA
• Nick Rogstad, ISyE, St. Simons, GA
• Scott Larson, ISyE, Marietta, GA
• Hasit Dewan, ISyE, Duluth, GA
• Roshan Balakrishnan, ISyE, Atlanta, GA
• Melina Blasetti, ISyE, Marietta, GA

Team 16 Emory Risk - Emory Healthcare Risk Modeling and Patient Quality Metrics 

• Alice Jinks, ISyE, Columbus, GA

• Sarah Both, ISyE, Columbus, OH
• Madeline Gaffney, ISyE, Atlanta, GA
• Thomas Ross, ISyE, Cumming, GA
• Brandon Wells, ISyE, Cartersville, GA
• Nathan Stefanick, ISyE, Vienna, VA
• Matthew Creatore, ISyE, Chapel Hill, NC
• Michael Senoo, ISyE, Hillsborough, NJ

Aerospace Engineering

Ostrow Air  - Commuter Aircraft/Air-taxi Aircraft 2030

• Greg Hopkins, AE, Fayetteville, GA
• Alexander Ostrow, AE, Atlanta, GA
• Michael McCracken, AE, Duluth, GA
• Blake Finlayson, AE, Andover, MA

Biomedical Engineering

Liv'R Little - Laparoscopic Liver Maneuvering Device 

• Shyam Nathu, BME, Johns Creek, GA
• Aken Sanghavi, BME, Mumbai, India
• Monali Shah, BME, Milton, GA
• Asahi Murata, BME, Roswell, GA

Civil & Environmental Engineering

J2AD Engineering - Bridge Replacement - Lee St Over Heart of Georgia Railroad 

• Jiyoon Oh, CE, Seoul, South Korea
• Jessie Lei, CE, Vancouver, Canada
• Austin Foo, CE, Ipoh, Malaysia
• Donald Smith, CE, Imperial Beach, California

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Brighter SoluSuns -  Intelligent Triport 

• Hoai Thuong Nguyen, EE, Atlanta, GA
• Malik Barton, EE, Grayson, GA
• Michelle George, EE, Longmeadow, MA
• Marcus Fisher, EE, Atlanta, GA
• Jeremy Deremer, EE, Atlanta, GA
• Natalie Chu, EE, Atlanta, GA

Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering

Rampion - Dance Ramp Assembly Optimization Project 

• Julia Vorpahl, ID, Ellijay, GA
• Enrique Garcia, ME, Caracas, Venezuela
• Melissa Shi, ID, Nanjing, China
• Jeffrey Ding, ME, Dallas, TX

Industrial & Systems Engineering

12 Textron Quality - Textron Quality 

• Zhejing Liu, ISyE, Tainjin, China
• Scott Berry, ISyE, Roswell, GA
• Kerui Cui, ISyE, Suxi, Jaingsu, China
• Andre Evans, ISyE, Dacula, GA
• Saneel Prabhu, ISyE, Atlanta, GA
• Conor Tanzman, ISyE, Wilton, CT
• Ji Qi, ISyE, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China
• Gordon Nail, ISyE, Swainsboro, GA

Mechanical Engineering

Blankity Blank - Material Handling Revolution

• Brandon Will, ME, Circle Pines, MN
• Michael Bailey, ME, Canton, GA
• Austin Forgey, ME, McDonough, GA
• Hannah Larson, ME, Roswell, GA
• Lauren Perrine, ME, Potomac, MD

Interdisciplinary

Miracle on Techwood  - Lockblox 

• Ben Ibach, MSE, Jacksonville, FL
• Ben Rothschild, ME, Atlanta, GA
• Will Byars, ME, Columbus, OH
• Mick Baker, ME, Sandy Springs, GA
• Jake Salesky, ME

For more images visit the Flickr site. 

“I knew it would look good on my resume, and I think it got Delta’s attention,” Gachuz recalled in a recent conversation. “After I submitted my application, they called me back about a job two days later.”

Gachuz has been working for Delta for several weeks now as a ramp agent, which means he helps with loading and unloading baggage and cargo from the planes, as well as occasionally guiding planes into and out of gateways.

He also plans to continue with the other three LEAP courses and will complete the certification program. When asked what he learned from the first course, Gachuz said, “I didn’t know much about logistics before I started. Now I do. I also learned how to present myself, and how to use the terminology.”

The LEAP program is housed in Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL) and is supported by a $350,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Additional funding has been provided by Schneider National, Inc. The certification is designed to attract a younger workforce and prepare them for successful careers in supply chain and logistics.

The program is currently tuition-free for 16-24 year olds in metro Atlanta counties, as well as active-duty service members. The four courses with the LEAP program are the aforementioned Supply Chain Management Principles, Warehousing Operations, Transportation Operations, and Customer Service Operations.

For more information on the LEAP program, visit https://www.scl.gatech.edu/LEAP.

To apply to the LEAP program, visit https://www.scl.gatech.edu/LEAP/apply.

“Since I started at Tech, I’ve been interested in supply chain management – moving a product from the supplier all the way to the end consumer – but there is a difference between that and supply chain engineering,” said Jordan. “With supply chain management, you are operating off a system that’s already been created. With supply chain engineering, you’re creating the supply chain. And I think that is a very interesting challenge.”

It’s not just classroom learning that has Jordan thinking about supply chain management. He also uniquely applies supply chain strategy on the football field. He notes that supply chain management is all about efficiency and optimization, focusing on the quickest way to get a product from point A to point B.

“On the football field, you want the most efficient and quickest way to score a touchdown,” said Jordan. “That’s what we aim to achieve as well with supply chain management and engineering, but with products. You want to get the product as quickly as possible to the consumer.”

While Jordan says that the strategy behind the game is ultimately all up to the coach, he does rely on it when executing. 

 “When I execute a play, I draw on supply chain strategy,” said Jordan. “If the ball needs to go to a certain spot, at a certain time, I envision the best way to do that with the players I have around me. It’s about optimizing the field.”

After football and earning his master’s, Jordan plans on joining the workforce in a supply chain management or engineering role. The combination of a business degree in supply chain management and a master’s degree in supply chain engineering sets him up well for a career in logistics.

“With both of my degrees [Jordan has a bachelor's in business administration from Tech], I’ll have a better understanding of why supply chain management is important, and I can put it into practice with the engineering experience,” said Jordan. “I understand why it’s important to have efficient supply chain management to run a company at optimal levels. Without good supply chain management, you don’t have a viable business.”

With companies like UPS and Delta in Atlanta, Jordan might even get to stay in the city that he’s come to love and continue cheering on Georgia Tech from the side lines.

His RA noticed that Peramanu was both outgoing and liked helping others and talked to him about how he could make an impact by participating in SGA. In a recent interview, Peramanu said that after learning how SGA worked, he was “naturally drawn to it and to the advocacy aspect of the role.” He was further inspired by hearing then-Georgia Tech SGA President Dillon Roseen speak at FASET.

Upon his arrival at Tech, Peramanu joined FreShGA, the freshman leadership organization. And, he said, he kept the “dream of being SGA president in the back of my mind.” Last year’s SGA president, ISyE fifth-year student Nagela Nukuna, invited him to be part of her cabinet as the vice president of campus services, and that experience cemented Peramanu’s desire to run for SGA president. “Something that drives me is the desire to leave a lasting impact at Georgia Tech,” he said.

In this interview, Peramanu discusses what qualities of leadership are most important, how he views the social advocacy aspect of the role, and what he hopes to accomplish in his tenure as SGA president.

A lot of ISyE students are in leadership positions, and you’re certainly an example of that. Why do you think this is the case, and what about ISyE do you think engenders leadership?

ISyE is the leadership degree at Georgia Tech. There are two reasons for that. The first is the engineering mindset that you learn. Efficiency is part of what it takes to be a leader, which is an industrial engineering way of thinking – such as prioritizing well and removing extraneous parts of an organization that aren’t doing well. The second reason is that industrial engineering is not just cubicle work – it’s engaging, with a lot of team work. ISyE was a huge factor in making me talk to as many people as possible, and to be as successful as I was in my VP of campus services role, which in turn helped set me up for the presidency role.

Building on that, what are some qualities of good leaders?

First and foremost is listening. Here’s a Game of Thrones reference: Jon Snow, who is a main character and a member of the Night’s Watch, is a natural-born leader. He was able to rally troops around him, but he wasn’t the actual leader of the Night’s Watch, and he overstepped boundaries. So someone pulled him aside and said, “You have to be led before you can lead.” In other words, you have to be a good teammate before you can be a good leader.

This really resonated with me. A lot of us think we have the capacity to be good leaders, but leadership is more than taking charge and telling people what to do. Listening is so important, making sure you hear what everyone else has to say.

 In addition, surround yourself with very smart and dedicated individuals. Most of being a leader is building the team in the first place.

You’ve said that the advocacy aspect of being SGA president was part of what drew you to the role. What are some specific goals that you want to accomplish by the end of your tenure?

So in terms of social activism, especially with recent events, we’ve come to the realization that certain organizations on campus – particularly certain marginalized communities – lack the resources they need to be successful: feeling secure, safe, and included. They should feel like Georgia Tech is a home.

So we obviously want to focus on these communities, but we also want to do things for all students. We want to revamp the GT Counseling Center website – the SGA VP of information technology is working on that to make it cleaner, better looking, and easier to navigate. We also want to allocate more resources toward the Counseling Center in general.

And something else we’re trying to do is to provide more resources for organizations, such as the LGBTQIA Resource Center, or the different minority communities such as the African American Student Union. They’re all struggling with funding. Our goal is to try to get resources for them, including space.

Another goal is to have every SGA member QPR trained – that stands for Question, Persuade, Refer – and to encourage other organizations to do the same. And Safe Space training [Georgia Tech’s LGBTQIA ally training program], diversity and inclusivity training – there are a lot of different things that people can be part of.

We have over 400 student organizations because of our diversity as a student body. And if we do not focus on our diversity as a student body and make sure that we embrace that diversity, then we’re going to struggle as a school.

Switching gears, could you tell us what you learned from your co-op and internship experiences?

I think it’s wonderful that Georgia Tech pushes co-ops and internships so hard. I did two co-ops at UPS, and then I interned at Clarkston Consulting. Working is an entirely different thing than taking classes because you have to be “on” for eight hours a day. It’s a different mindset. Co-ops and internships help you grow as a person in terms of your professionalism and your ability to be in a room with corporate executives, and they give you an opportunity to learn more. It’s a great training-wheels program to get you into the mindset of being an employee: waking up at 7:00 AM, dressing up every day, and going to work.

I highly recommend to younger students to go out and do it. Go apply at CareerBuzz. Even if you get rejected, interviewing is important. And you’ll learn a lot about what people want to hear from you.

What defines success for you?

I want to have a legacy at Georgia Tech. I want to be able to say I came to this school, but that I didn’t just get my degree and leave. Hopefully I will be able to make a positive difference. I want to be able to come back and see the progress of Georgia Tech – to see the things I helped build. For example, I’ve been part of working on the new Student Center, and when it eventually happens, I’ll be very excited to see what’s come of it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to leave my own mark.

Drivers, builders, designers, engineers, executives, and even academics with ties to Georgia Tech made their mark on the worlds of stock car and drag racing.

Read the Full Story:

Georgia Tech's Racing Roots, Part 2: The Need for Speed

“Alejandro has made valuable contributions to both the Stewart School and his field through his research related to supply chain management, logistics, and optimization,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “His appointment to the Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professorship will enable him to further advance in his career and impact his field.”

Toriello’s research interests lie in the theory and application of supply chain management, logistics and transportation, and in related optimization methodologies.

“I'm honored to receive an early career professorship, and thank the Benatars for their generous support of the Stewart School,” said Toriello. “The Benatar professorship will be instrumental in continuing and growing my research program over the coming years.”

Toriello received both his BSIE (2003) and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering (2010) from Georgia Tech.

Prior to joining ISyE in 2013, he served as an assistant professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.

MedShare, the Medical Surplus Recovery Organization (MSRO) that served as the researchers’ site of research and analysis, by all accounts excels in its mission to “improve the quality of life of people and our planet.” Among the nation’s top-rated nonprofits, the Decatur-based MSRO bridges the gap between surplus and need by shipping excess medical supplies and equipment to developing countries. Since being founded in 1998, MedShare has delivered over $206 million of humanitarian aid and has helped over 19 million patients worldwide. In addition to the social impact of donations, the organization has saved 2.5 million pounds of excess medical items from entering landfills in the United States.

Medshare CEO Charles Redding, who received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech, has forged a number of relationships between his organization and alma mater. On a visit to Scheller College of Business Professor Atalay Atasu’s MBA class in supply chain management, Redding spoke about how MedShare does not fit the typical supply and demand model. Due to its never-ending mission to help those in need and its dependency on donations, MedShare has conceivably infinite demand and very limited supply. He told students how MedShare matched demand and supply: Recipients logged into the system to view current inventory and select those items with which to fill their shipping containers. He compared it to “shopping on Amazo

These exchanges led Professors Atasu and Beril Toktay each to write a case study focused on different facets of MedShare’s exciting supply chain model. Can Zhang, a PhD student in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering who is broadly interested in socially responsible operations, heard about these efforts and, along with one of his advisors, George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer, also became interested in studying MedShare. In studying the nonprofit’s operations, the four researchers discovered that allowing recipients to view and select from an online list of available inventory could create time-based competition in the ordering system, which resulted in recipients selecting and receiving medical items that might not meet their most pressing needs. Zhang applied game theory to the creation of models that would better match inventory and need. He determined that a “wish list” model would provide clarity in regard to recipients’ top priorities. Instead of displaying inventory from which recipients could “go shopping,” the wish list model would let recipients rank their priorities from a list of all potential items, but would hide actual inventory. MedShare would then be able to see which items from their current inventory would best supply which recipient—so they could service that need first.

Redding said MedShare always gives recipients surveys that include the question, “Were you able to use the equipment you ordered?” Most recipients usually answered “yes.” However, Redding noted, “We never asked the question, ‘Did we provide what you really wanted?’ We were forcing them to select from what was available as opposed to identifying what they really needed and having them wait until it was available.” He praised Zhang and the team of researchers in providing a more efficient model for delivering humanitarian aid that can do the most good for a community.

For his work on “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation,” Zhang won the 2017 POMS College of Sustainable Operations Best Student Paper Award. He is also a finalist for the 2017 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition and the 2017 MSOM Student Paper Competition. Zhang said the project excites him because of the social welfare and humanitarian angle. He said, “I’m from a small town in China, and I have been a part of the people who received aid from others. Therefore, I feel very motivated to study a problem like this—how to help people more effectively. My hope is to build an academic career where I have social impact by working on scarce resource allocation problems in nonprofits and healthcare supply chains.”

References: 

A. Atasu, B. Toktay, W.M. Yeo, C. Zhang. “Effective Medical Surplus Recovery.” Forthcoming in Production and Operations Management.

C. Zhang, A. Atasu, T. Ayer, B. Toktay. “Truthful Mechanisms for Medical Surplus Product Allocation.” Submitted.

As the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting best practices and advances in operations research, management science, and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making, and outcomes, INFORMS reserves the Fellow Award for distinguished individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments in operations research and the management sciences.  

In the announcement of the Fellow Awards, the organization recognized Ahmed for “exceptional contributions to stochastic and discrete optimization, dedicated service to the optimization community, and outstanding mentorship of future scholars.”

INFORMS commended Romeijn for “outstanding contributions in research to optimization, supply chain management, and healthcare, education, academic leadership, and service to INFORMS and the profession.” 

About Shabbir Ahmed 

Ahmed said, “I am very honored to be part of the distinguished scholars and practitioners selected as INFORMS Fellows this year. My sincere thanks to the colleagues who nominated me and the selection committee. I am particularly happy to share this honor with three other researchers in my area of stochastic optimization and, of course, with my ISyE colleague Edwin.”

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor in ISyE Ahmed is interested in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems and their applications in energy and other networked systems. His research in these areas has been supported by federal agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; as well as by industrial organizations such as ExxonMobil, IBM, and Samsung.

Ahmed has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-2010), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-2008). His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship from ISyE, and the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation award. He is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters, and was an area editor for Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science and a department editor for IISE Transactions (Operations Engineering and Analysis).

He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

About Edwin Romeijn

“It is a great honor to be recognized by the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) with the 2017 Fellow Award,” said Romeijn. “Together with my colleague Shabbir Ahmed, we join the ranks of many distinguished individuals who also have been recognized for their contributions to operations research and management sciences.

As the Stewart School Chair, Romeijn is responsible for overseeing ISyE as the nation’s largest industrial engineering program.

His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.

Romeijn is currently an associate editor of IISE Transactions. He is a member of INFORMS, Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). In April 2017, he was recognized by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) with the 2017 IISE Fellow Award, which recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering.

Romeijn received his M.S. in econometrics and Ph.D. in operations research from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

The NMMB is the principal forum at the U.S. National Academies for all national issues related to innovative materials and advanced manufacturing, and has oversight responsibility for National Research Council activities in these technology areas.

The NMMB was created in recognition of the increasing importance of materials science to innovations in engineering and manufacturing. The NMMB combines the charges of two preexisting boards: the National Materials Advisory Board and the Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design. Its mission is to build on the past achievements of its parent boards by providing objective, independent assessments of the current state of materials and manufacturing research - including at the atomic, molecular, and nano scales - and the applications of new and existing materials in innovative ways, including pilot-scale and large-scale manufacturing, the design of new devices, and disposal.

Previous studies by NMMB have covered diverse, timely, and consequential topics including global supply chains and national security, real-time detection of damage to materials in aerospace applications and of threat agents, integrated computational materials engineering, and management of existing U.S. materials resources. Under the sponsorship of U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and the National Science Foundation, NMMB will be responsible for the strategic planning, program development, and administrative oversight of studies and other activities that expand this existing body of work.

The negative effect of emergencies is disproportionally high on low income or vulnerable populations, complicating ongoing needs in health, nutrition, education, and other key areas. Whether an emergency or a long term development challenge, there are often many actors, limited resources, variability and uncertainly, and potential disruptions in the demand and supply chains. All of these factors highlight the importance of logistics and supply chain management in these contexts.

In light of these grand challenges, the annual Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics provides an open forum to discuss new solutions in health systems, disaster preparedness and response, and long-term development.  Co-organized by the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) at Georgia Institute of Technology, INSEAD, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, and Northeastern University, the conference offers a unique platform for participants to discuss challenges, share best practices, and explore potential collaborations, with the goal of enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in health and humanitarian systems, and ultimately improving and saving lives around the world.

2017 marked the 9^th year of the conference, which took place during June 7-9, in Copenhagen, Denmark at the UN City, hosted and co-organized by the UNICEF Supply Division. The event drew over 200 attendees from 39 countries and 127 organizations, including non-governmental organizations and UN agencies as well as government, industry, foundations, and academia.

The agenda featured 3 plenary panel sessions and 53 break-out presentation and workshop sessions led by practitioners and thought leaders on current challenges and solutions in health and humanitarian logistics. 31 posters were presented, providing a platform for networking and discussions around new tools and implementations.

Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations for the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergencies Programme division, delivered the opening keynote, and addressed the role of logistics in health and humanitarian response and the importance of global, national and local capacity building, cross-sector collaboration and partnerships, and performance measurement. Brennan led the Ebola Response as the Director at the WHO headquarters from October 2014 to January 2016 and now oversees the organization’s response to global health emergencies as part of the new Emergencies Programme, from preparedness and prevention to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks.

Plenary panel sessions included presentations focused on: 1) Global Health Emergencies; 2) Innovation and Influencing Markets; and 3) Ensuring Sustainability of Supply Chain Systems Strengthening Interventions. Keynote and plenary presentations are available on the conference website: chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/program/panels.

Participants were active on Twitter (#2017HHLConf) throughout the event, sharing points and reflections, reacting to the presentations and workshops. Participants also commented that the conference was “very educational and allowed for great networking among participants” and “the workshops were well-organized, insightful, and very informative.”

The conference could not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from key partners such as the UPS Foundation, the premiere sponsor for the 9^th year, Imperial Health Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, the William David Institute at the University of Michigan, and the Partnership for Supply Chain Management.

“We are proud that the Stewart School continues to be recognized as the top program of its kind. ISyE remains at the forefront of the field as a result of the hard work and commitment of our preeminent faculty, remarkable students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair.

Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering again ranked No. 7 overall, No. 3 among public universities, and all 11 of the programs within the college are ranked in the top 10.

Efforts to launch the theory-focused institute were supported by the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) with faculty from the Colleges of Engineering, Sciences and Computing. Xiaoming Huo, principal investigator and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), will serve as the executive director of TRIAD. “The establishment of TRIAD is tremendously beneficial considering data science is a phenomenon that brings with it so many opportunities. There is a lot of research that needs to be conducted in this emerging field, and we will focus on building the theoretical foundations to establish the principles of data science,” said Huo.

“With the launch of TRIAD and the already well-established NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub, Georgia Tech plays a key role nationally in data science from theory to applications to building community partnerships,” said Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of IDEaS and a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

Dana Randall, fellow co-executive director and professor in the School of Computer Science, said, “Advances in data science foundations can lead to revolutionary new solutions for analyzing data. TRIAD will accelerate this research by bridging fields to expand our collective capabilities.”

Both Aluru and Randall serve as co-principal investigators of TRIAD, along with Prasad Tetali, a professor in the School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science, and Jeff Wu, the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and a professor in ISyE. “The emphasis on theoretical foundations (of data science) offers a great opportunity for mathematicians to actively engage with other scientists and help make breakthroughs in this fast growing interdisciplinary field," said Tetali.

The analysis of massive, dynamic, noisy and complex data arising in virtually every sphere of human activity is a pressing problem of our time. NSF is responding by dedicating $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes, including TRIAD. Encompassing 14 institutions in 11 states, these projects will promote long-term research and training activities in data science that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

“Data is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation,” said Jim Kurose, NSF assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). “These new TRIPODS projects will help build the theoretical foundations of data science that will enable continued data-driven discovery and breakthroughs across all fields of science and engineering.”    

According to NSF, the TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, enhanced visualization capabilities and more. They also support innovative educational pathways to train the next generation of data scientists.

TRIAD will bring together senior, mid-career and junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and data science practitioners at large using focused working groups, national and international workshops and organized innovation labs. It will build an intellectual atmosphere to connect stakeholders from across the nation and the world on a regular basis.

Initially, TRIAD will focus on four research topics: advanced mathematical modeling for contemporary data; new inferential strategies that can be both scalable and de-centralized; efficient optimization tools with theoretical guarantees; and applications in the context of large datasets from domains including biology, design, manufacturing, logistics and sustainability.

TRIAD will launch with 39 committed faculty members from across Georgia Tech, including from ISyE, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Mathematics, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Computational Science and Engineering and the School of Computer Science.

NSF’s award establishes TRIAD as a Phase I investment. It may be subsequently expanded to Phase II through a second competitive proposal process.

“Since Yao joined the Stewart School four years ago, she has made significant contributions to ISyE and her field,” said Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in ISyE. “Her appointment as the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor recognizes her impressive research in big data analytics, signal/information processing, and machine learning, and will enable her to continue advancing in her career.”

Xie’s new appointment will allow her to further pursue her research in sequential statistical methods, statistical signal processing, big data analysis, compressed sensing, and optimization. Her work has applications to wireless communications, sensor networks, as well as medical and astronomical imaging.

"I am incredibly excited and honored to receive the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professorship and extremely grateful for the generous gift from the Nash family,” Xie said. “The award not only provides support to further my research in building useful statistical methods and machine-learning algorithms, but it also comes as a welcome recognition from ISyE.”

Before coming to ISyE in 2013, Xie served as a research scientist in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University after receiving her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2011.

Deloitte Consulting LLP (“Deloitte Consulting”) and a group of Atlanta area corporations helped launch the initiative. The study is the first phase of #SupplyChainCity, and its purpose is to baseline the current state of the region’s supply chain capabilities and guide Metro Atlanta toward a leading role in the next generation of industry.

The study evaluated four key metrics across seven of the largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States known for their supply chain capabilities: New York–New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

Access a PDF version of the report within the Metro Atlanta Chamber website.

Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) could help revolutionize the treatment of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and other disorders by enabling broad use of potentially curative therapies that utilize living cells – such as immune cells and stem cells – as “drugs.” Examples of these highly promising therapies include T cell-based immunotherapies for blood cancers, such as the one developed at the University of Pennsylvania and approved in August by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, and a gene-modified stem cell therapy recently approved in Europe for a form of the so-called “bubble boy” syndrome.

To facilitate the widespread application of these cutting-edge emerging treatments, CMaT will develop robust and scalable technologies, innovative analytical tools, and engineering systems that will enable industry and clinical facilities to reproducibly manufacture efficient, safe and affordable cell-therapy products. The center, one of four ERCs announced September 12 by the NSF, will also develop improved models for a robust supply chain, storage and distribution system for these therapeutic cell products.

Ben Wang, Gwaltney Chair in Manufacturing Systems and executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics, are Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) faculty members who are involved with CMaT. Wang and White’s research will focus on developing approaches that will enable the manufacture, storage, and distribution of these cell products, continuing their research already underway that is supported by the Marcus Foundation. Other ISyE faculty members may become involved with CMaT in the future.

“For over 30 years, NSF Engineering Research Centers have promoted innovation, helped to maintain our competitive edge, and added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “They bring together talented innovators and entrepreneurs with resources from academia, industry and government to produce engineers and engineering systems that solve real-world problems.  I am confident that these new ERCs will strengthen U.S. competitiveness for the next generation and continue our legacy of improving the quality of life for all Americans.”

In addition to the consistent manufacture of  cell-based therapies, the public-private CMaT initiative will also help develop a skilled, diverse and inclusive bio-manufacturing workforce through extensive education and training activities at the K-12, technical college, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels.

Living cells become “drugs”

“Unlike pharmaceuticals and other products now used in medical treatments, cells are living entities whose properties can significantly change depending on nuances in the way they are grown, stored or otherwise manipulated,” said Krishnendu Roy, director of CMaT and the Robert A. Milton chair professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The center will develop new engineering tools and scalable methods to better characterize, expand, differentiate, separate, transport and store high-quality cells so they provide consistent therapeutic effects, allowing them to be used in standardized therapies by clinicians to serve large numbers of patients worldwide.”

Beyond Georgia Tech, the center will include major partners – the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus – as well as affiliate partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, the Gladstone Institutes, and Michigan Technological University. Additional international academic partners, as well as industry and the U.S. national laboratories, will also be critical collaborators in the effort.

Moving discoveries into application

“Georgia Tech has a long history of building collaborative partnerships with industry, the national labs and other research universities. With the support of the NSF and this new ERC, we will be able to capitalize on expertise in multiple areas, taking transformative research from the laboratory to practice much more quickly,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “The Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies will also help us educate, train and prepare the workforce in a new industry, thereby continuing to strengthen the U.S. economy.”

Clinical trials have already established the effectiveness of several cell-based therapies and many other trials are underway. But for these exciting therapies to advance into broad healthcare use, the cells will have to be produced in much larger quantities and with more consistent quality than is now available. There are also very few, if any, established industry standards for analytics and processes in cell manufacturing, which hinders consistent production of safe and efficacious cells. Another key limitation identified by industry is the need for a highly-trained workforce.

CMaT would address these barriers through transformative innovations that build upon a series of earlier efforts, including the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium (NCMC) roadmap, infrastructure established at Georgia Tech with support from the Marcus Foundation, quality and other standards programs from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and independent industry-led bodies, and translational activities by industry, entrepreneurs and other partners.

The NSF’s multidisciplinary engineering research centers address unique, complex engineering challenges by stimulating knowledge and tech transfer between different sectors, from electronics to energy to infrastructure. Each center takes on a specific engineering research challenge.

“The overall goal of the NSF Engineering Research Centers program is nothing less than to revolutionize engineering research and education in the United States,” said Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for engineering. “We look forward to the exciting advances and outcomes in these important areas.”

Accelerating clinical trials

Beyond established cell-based therapies, the work of CMaT should accelerate the development of new therapies and the testing needed to bring them into the clinic, said Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC). Regenerative medicine applications could offer new ways of treating diseases for which there are now essentially no treatments, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke.

“There are a significant number of cell therapy clinical trials and investments in the field,” Stice said. “But there is little or no investment in a set of consistent standardization methods to optimize how these therapies should work. For instance, we know that cell therapies will improve human health, but right now it’s difficult to guarantee that each dose produced will be as potent as the next. The work done by CMaT researchers will help solve some of these problems.”

The University of Pennsylvania develops cellular therapies and has conducted more than 40 clinical trials of cell-based therapies, including those for engineered T cell therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. An example is recently-approved treatment for relapsed and refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia in pediatric and young adult patients.

“The cell and gene therapy fields are on the cusp of multiple regulatory approvals in the near term,” said Bruce Levine, Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The challenges ahead lie in developing manufacturing and testing processes incorporating automation that can bring costs down and allow access to more patients.”

Developing broad-based innovations

Critical innovations often occur at the boundaries of disciplines, and CMaT will bring together relevant specialties for both research and workforce development, noted Madeline Torres-Lugo, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.

“Due to the complexity of cells as living organisms, a team with a strong background in biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and engineering is required for this initiative,” Torres-Lugo said. “Our participation and contribution to CMaT will ensure that Puerto Rico not only remains at the forefront of pharma manufacturing, but also supports cell manufacturing technologies here and around the world by educating highly talented engineering students.”

CMaT testbeds have been selected to address several cell types that are in early stages of clinical adoption or moving toward clinical applications, but it isn't yet clear what cell types will have the greatest therapeutic impacts, noted Sean Palecek, the Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Therefore, one of the center’s challenges will be to ensure that fundamental discoveries, and tool and technology development efforts, will apply to multiple cell types.

“Our work will provide safer and more potent cell products that will allow clinical studies to establish the effectiveness of these cells as therapeutics,” Palecek said. “In addition, our work on scaling cell production will enable manufacturing of sufficient numbers of cells to replace damaged organs, such as the loss of heart muscle after a heart attack, at a cost that makes these therapies accessible to broad segments of society. We will also train the future leaders of the emerging therapeutic cell manufacturing industry. These students and their work establishing this industry will be the most significant impact of CMaT.”

New centers among 19 ERCs

Since the program’s inception in 1985, NSF has funded a total of 74 ERCs and will support 19 in this fiscal year, including four new centers. Each center receives NSF funding for up to 10 years. During this time, centers build partnerships with industry, universities and other government agencies that will sustain them for years to come.

In May, the National Academies published a report, “A new vision for center-based engineering research,” which was the result of an NSF-funded study to examine the future of the NSF ERC program.

The report identifies and recommends strategies to enable NSF multidisciplinary engineering research centers to continue addressing key research, education and innovation needs of the United States in a changing global context.

“ERCs are widely known as outstanding examples of successful partnerships between universities, private industry and government that have made significant contributions to address national challenges,” said Don Millard, acting division director for the NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “We are continually working with the scientific and engineering communities, as well as private industry and government partners, to ensure NSF-funded centers and grantees are best-equipped to match societal needs with research abilities.”

Cummings’ research interests lie primarily in data privacy, with connections to machine learning, algorithmic economics, optimization, statistics, and information theory. Her work has focused on problems such as strategic aspects of data generation, incentivizing truthful reporting of data, privacy-preserving algorithm design, impacts of privacy policy, and human decision-making.

Prior to coming to ISyE, Cummings received her B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Southern California (2011), her M.S. in computer science from Northwestern University (2013), and her Ph.D. in computing and mathematical sciences from the California Institute of Technology (2017).

Cummings won the Best Paper Award at the 2014 International Symposium on Distributed Computing, and she was the recipient of a Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer Science.

She serves on the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council's Privacy Committee.

Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and professor in ISyE, said, “I’m pleased that George has been named as the A. Russell Chandler III Early Career Professor. At this stage in his promising career, he has already proven to be a talented professor and researcher specializing in nonlinear optimization and machine learning, and I look forward to seeing where his career will take him.”

This new appointment will enable Lan to further his research in theory, algorithms, and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming. He is actively pursuing the application of stochastic and nonlinear optimization models/algorithms in large-scale data analysis, such as machine learning and image processing. His research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

“This is a great honor for me. It encourages and facilitates my exploration of important research topics and provision of quality service to ISyE and the community,” Lan said. “I will use the A. Russell Chandler Early Career Professorship to support graduate and undergraduate students for research and to supplement my travel funds to build research collaboration.”

Lan received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech (IE 09) and served as a faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida from 2009-2015. He joined ISyE in spring 2016.

His academic honors include an NSF CAREER Award, first place in the INFORMS JFIG Paper Competition, finalist in the Mathematical Optimization Society Tucker Prize, second place in the INFORMS George Nicholson prize, and first place in the INFORMS Computing Society Student Paper competition.

“This recognition is a testament to ISyE’s dedication and commitment to excellence in education and research,” said Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in ISyE. “We’ve held the top ranking for 23 consecutive years thanks to the hard work and collective efforts of our world-class faculty, outstanding students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni.”

The overall College of Engineering (CoE) ranking marks the fifth time CoE has grabbed this spot on the U.S. News chart, and it again ties the College with the California Institute of Technology's engineering program. All engineering specialties but one at Georgia Tech placed in the top five of their kinds, a unique distinction for a program as large as the College of Engineering.

U.S News Undergraduate Rankings - September 12, 2017

#4 Engineering (no change and still tied with Cal Tech)

Engineering Programs

#1 Industrial/Manufacturing

#1 Biomedical

#2 Aerospace

#2 Civil

#2 Environmental (up from #4 and tied with Stanford and Michigan)

#3 Mechanical

#3 Chemical (up from #4)

#4 Electrical

#5 Materials (up from #6)

#6 Computer Engineering

The program committee was comprised of Professors Benoit Montreuil and Martin Savelsbergh of Georgia Tech, Professor Iris Vis of the University of Groningen (and representing DINALOG), and SCL’s managing director, Tim Brown.
 
“This is just one more way Georgia Tech fosters a global ecosystem of academic, industry, and government partners focused on next generation research and education,” Brown said. “Together, we can continue to build on the port’s successes and continue to bring the world to Savannah.”

The tower study is a follow-up to the group’s 2014 ant raft research, which examined how the insects link their bodies in order to build waterproof structures that stay afloat for months. The ants march along until they come to an open space — the edge of the raft — then settle in to become a building block of the raft.

They do the same thing for the towers, searching for an empty spot like a car in a crowded parking lot. Once an individual ant finds one, typically at the top of the tower, she stops and braces for more ants to climb on top and go vertical.

Learn more about how they do it, why the towers are always sinking and why scientists and engineers should care about ant movements.

The 2017 cohort represented corporate, government, and nongovernmental organizations such as the Carter Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Gambian Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Task Force for Global Health, UNICEF, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Food for Peace, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and local ministries of health in African countries.

The certificate program consists of three courses (2 days each): Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations, Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response, and Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response. Topics include distribution network design, strategies for managing inventory and uncertainty, resource allocation, and systems dynamics related to a broad range of activities including preparing, responding to, and recovery from disasters and health emergencies, as well as ongoing efforts in strengthening and managing health systems.

2017 participants had high praise for the HHSCM program, highlighting the importance and relevance of the practical applications studied in the course and how they plan to incorporate the new skills and knowledge in their current and future work. Bonaventure Mulama, Advisor, Humanitarian Programme Design & Management in Kenya remarked: “The training provided me with frameworks and tools to aid decision making at a more strategic level. One more benefit is that I met new people thus improving my professional network in quantity and quality.” Likewise, Mohammed Visram, Pharmacist for the Kagera Regional Health Management Team (RHMT) in Tanzania commented: “The participants have had very comprehensive and diverse knowledge and experience in their field and hence we could share the best practices.”

Others shared objectives for future applications of their learnings in the course. Yves Lucien Hakorimana, Tropical Health specialist at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Senegal commented: “As Reproductive Health commodities expert who works in most humanitarian crisis countries, I understood more how I need to use mathematical modeling in supply chain analysis and design and address easily right recommendations for decision making.” Andrew Auruku, Logistics Officer for the Serere District Local Government in Uganda noted: “After attending the training, I will be able to tailor correct forecasting and allocations very scarce resources to target beneficiaries in my context.”

10 scholarships were awarded to HHSCM program applicants representing 7 countries. Scholarship support comes from benefactors including the UPS Foundation, Pete Quinones, and Richard “Rick” Zalesky Jr. (CE 1978) and Charlene Zalesky (HS 1977). The courses are led by CHHS co-directors Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE William W. George Chair, and Julie Swann, ISyE Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor. Guest instructors include former CHHS co-director Özlem Ergun, associate professor at Northeastern University, Sheereen Brown from the Task Force for Global Health, John Bartholdi, The Manhattan Associates/Dabbiere Chair in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Logistics Innovation & Research Center in Panama, and Paulo Gonçalves, professor at University of Lugano.

For further information on the Certificate in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management, please visit: https://chhs.gatech.edu/professional-education.

Cheung enrolled in LEAP and – in addition to completing all four courses that compose the program – went on to earn national certifications in supply chain management, customer service operation, transportation operation, and warehousing operations. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the LEAP program was what Cheung learned about manufacturing, but warehousing and transportation were also key.

As he pointed out, “Without being able to move and store products, manufacturing doesn’t help anyone. The main pieces are really in transportation and warehousing, because this gets products to the consumer.”

Thanks to the LEAP program and his national certifications, Cheung attained a job with Ceva Logistics, working as an operations clerk on the company’s contract with Daimler Trucks North America.

“Ceva is hired out by Daimler to do their ‘milk runs’ – their daily routes,” explained Cheung. “We deliver truck parts to all their dealers in the Southeast region.”

Cheung values his current position with Ceva, saying that when he interviewed for the role, his now-supervisor asked, “Why do you want to be a clerk, when you have this [LEAP] certification from Georgia Tech?”

“My answer was that I needed experience, because logistics are ever-changing,” Cheung said. “Logistics won’t be the same in 30 years, much less 10 years. It changes on the dime – it’s never the same, and if it is, something is wrong.” Currently, he schedules trips for drivers and tracks both their hours of service and bills of lading.

Cheung plans to further build on his LEAP education. While working at Ceva, he is also enrolled at the Florida Institute of Technology, working online toward a bachelor’s of business administration degree. After he completes his undergraduate degree, he plans to get his master’s degree in supply chain engineering.

In addition, he has remained involved with LEAP at his high school alma mater by encouraging students to enroll in LEAP and mentoring them once they do. Cheung makes himself available both by email and by text, helping the students work through questions that arise on the class discussion boards. He periodically stops in at the school and meets with the students in person.

When asked what makes him so passionate about LEAP, Cheung has a ready answer: “[On a practical level], logistics is a good industry to be in; it’s recession-proof. Regardless of the economy you’re in, you still need to get goods from one place to another. Plus, the industry always needs more people to do the work.”

“It was a great experience,” he added.

The LEAP program is housed in Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL) and is supported by a $350,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Additional funding has been provided by Schneider National, Inc. The certification is designed to attract a younger workforce and prepare them for successful careers in supply chain and logistics.

“I am honored to be appointed as the Anderson-Interface Chair and to be positioned to play a role in continuing Ray C. Anderson's rich legacy of promoting environmental sustainability,” said Ahmed. “I am very grateful for the generous support from the Anderson family, the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, and Interface, Inc., as it will enhance my work on optimization under risk and uncertainty, and its applications in reliable and efficient operations of renewable power systems.”

The Anderson-Interface Chair was created to support an eminent teacher-scholar in a position of academic leadership in the field of sustainability, energy, climate, and natural systems.

“Over the years, Shabbir's research activities have made significant impacts on the Stewart School and his field,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “This well-deserved appointment as Anderson-Interface Chair will provide him with opportunities to enhance his position as a leader in the societally important area of energy systems.”

Ahmed’s research interests are in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems and their applications in energy and other networked systems. His research in these areas has been supported by federal agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; as well as by industrial organizations such as ExxonMobil, IBM, and Samsung.

Ahmed has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-2010), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-2008). His honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, the Coca-Cola Junior Professorship from ISyE, and the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation award. He is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters, and was an area editor for Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science and a department editor for IISE Transactions (Operations Engineering and Analysis).

“I am pleased to congratulate Xiaoming on his selection as an ASA Fellow,” said Edwin Romeijn, ISyE’s H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “This well-deserved recognition reflects his many significant contributions over the years to both the field of statistical science and the Stewart School.”

Fellows will be officially recognized at an awards ceremony on August 1, 2017, during the Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore, Maryland.

About Xiaoming Huo

Huo's research interests include statistical theory, statistical computing, and issues related to data analytics. He has made numerous contributions on topics such as sparse representation, wavelets, and statistical problems in detectability. Huo’s papers have appeared in top journals, and some of them are highly cited. He has been a senior member of IEEE since May 2004, and he was selected as a fellow of IPAM in September 2004. He won the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2005. His work has led to an interview by Emerging Research Fronts in June 2006 in the field of mathematics.

Huo received a B.S. in mathematics from China’s University of Science and Technology in 1993, and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He joined ISyE in 1999.

Chris Hauser didn’t come to Georgia Tech with a plan to go on to medical school, but at some point the idea settled in the back of his mind. When he graduated in spring 2011 with a degree in industrial and systems engineering (ISyE), he decided to choose a position that would help him settle the issue.

“I was able to get a job at a health care consulting firm in Atlanta, and that pretty much helped me solidify my interest in pursuing medicine,” he recalls.

He reached out to Georgia Tech’s then pre-health advisor, who shared insights into what admission committees look for and helped him pull his application together. “I was taken aback by how helpful she was, considering I was not even a student,” he says. Now, the Marietta native is in his second year of medical school at Emory University, leaning toward primary care.

Hauser’s path to medical school was certainly not traditional, but these days, the road less traveled is getting more and more traffic, notes Georgia Tech’s current pre-health advisor, Francisco Castelan.

“The landscape is still very competitive, but it has changed,” he says. “Twenty years ago, for example, everybody was a biology major. Now students could be a psych major, an engineering major — really any particular major they want.”

A degree from Georgia Tech goes a long way toward convincing admission committees that a student is up to the rigors of medical school; still, Castelan cautions, students must “fill in the gaps” to maximize their chance of success.

Starting Strong

Approximately 1,500 Georgia Tech undergrads, graduate students, and alumni are currently seeking pre-health guidance, and of that number, Castelan estimates, about 90 percent self-identify as “pre-med.”

Although medical school aspirants can contact the Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising office at any point — even after graduation, as Hauser did — Castelan’s office reaches out to pre-med students as early as orientation in hopes of getting them off to a strong start.

He wishes he could assure these students that they will all be accepted to medical school — after all, they were smart enough to get into Tech — but there are too many variables at play, he says.

“I can’t predict what their GPA will be in four years. I don’t know how much research or clinical experience they will have, what their MCAT scores will be — what I do know is what tools and resources are available to help them strengthen their application to be competitive.”

The first step for most students is signing up for the pre-health email list, which will keep them apprised through a weekly digest of both on- and off-campus events and opportunities. T-square, Georgia Tech’s online collaboration platform, also has a pre-health site.

Throughout the year, students can take advantage of individual advising, workshops and seminars, mock interviews, peer advising, and print and electronic resources — plus every spring, there’s a Pre-health Opportunity Fair, complete with health care recruiters and professional school representatives.

Engaging in Exploration

While there’s a definite “checklist” for pre-med students, this should not be confused with a “mold,” Castelan says. “The message I like to give students is that it’s not about fitting a mold — having to do this or that — it’s about turning their Georgia Tech experience into a journey, keeping an open mind, and engaging in a lot of exploration and self-reflection in the process of making meaningful decisions.”

This is not just to show admission committees they’ve thoroughly vetted their career choice, Castelan says, it’s also to prevent students from making the wrong choice. “I tell them, medical school is not the time to find out you faint at the sight of blood!”

Varun Yarabarla, a 2016 biomedical engineering graduate from John’s Creek, Georgia, who is now a Fulbright Scholar doing research abroad in Switzerland, began his pre-med explorations freshman year, taking advantage of a volunteer program at Grady Hospital.

“I put in over 400 hours there,” he says. “I did some time in oncology and neurology, and I got to meet a lot of families. Seeing what it felt like to really connect with patients and their families — that’s how I started seeing this is right for me, this is what I wanted to do.”

Clark Howell, a 2014 ISyE graduate who went into a master’s in health systems at Georgia Tech while applying to medical school, has also taken advantage of volunteer opportunities at Grady, as well as shadowing in clinics and operating rooms in North Carolina, where he’s from and where his father is a doctor.

“Even though I’m squeamish, I learned I can be in that environment,” he says. “I can see someone open up a body and look at the organs.”

Through a Georgia Tech professor, Howell also learned about an internship in telemedicine at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, which turned into a job. “I was able to find regular work experience doing what I already knew, but in the health care field, so I could see again that this is really what I want to do.”

Research-Wise

Research is another way students can strengthen their applications while testing out their aptitude and tolerance for the intricacies of medicine.

Georgia Tech encourages and supports undergraduate research, and its Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program offers a 10-point plan for making the most of this culture of discovery.

Yarabarla began conducting research his freshman year through Georgia Tech’s President’s Undergraduate Research Award, which pays students for assisting faculty in their labs.

His junior year, he transitioned into (former) Professor Ravi Bellamkonda’s lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “I was really lucky to work in his lab because it’s a neurology lab,” he says. “That’s what I want to do as a doctor — neurologist or neurosurgeon.”

His year of research as a Fulbright Scholar focuses on Alzheimer’s, and that experience, he hopes, will push his application “over the top,” research-wise.

Acing the Academics

Given that no particular major is required for medical school, and Georgia Tech (like most universities) does not have a pre-med curriculum, per se, many students need extra guidance to ensure that they are getting the right courses, Castelan says.

Pre-health advising can help students eliminate the guesswork, and Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry recently launched customizable pre-health biochemistry and chemistry tracks to help students meet or exceed requirements for a range of health-related schools. Similar tracks are available through biomedical engineering and biological sciences, as well, and an undergraduate neuroscience degree and pre-health minor are currently in the pipeline for approval.

As an ISyE major, Howell at first tried to flesh out the required coursework on his own. “I found out, you don’t need a pre-med major, you just need classes, so I took some of the necessary classes — biology and chemistry,” he says. He failed his first biology test, so he sought out a study group and later passed the course with an A.

Although medical schools are keeping a more open mind to majors across disciplines, it’s still especially important for pre-med students to perform well in key classes like biology and chemistry, Castelan notes.

Given the importance of grades, Yarabarla says, some prospective pre-med students express trepidation about coming to a rigorous school like Georgia Tech.

When he was president of Georgia Tech’s American Medical Student Association, he tried to reassure them. “I would tell them, I have another perspective on that,” he recalls. “I don’t know how it is at other institutions, but there are so many resources for pre-health students here, plus some of my friends who are already in med school, they tell me the rigor we go through prepares us really well.”

Hauser, now at Emory, echoes that endorsement. “Georgia Tech does a great job of preparing you, for one, how to think analytically and solve problems, and two, how to work with other individuals,” he says. “You’re teaching each other a lot, and that, plus the analytical mindset, is directly applicable to med school.”

Conquering the MCAT

In reviewing academic histories, medical schools keep in mind that rigorous schools make it difficult for students to present with stellar grade-point averages. The MCAT, notes the Pre-Health FAQ site, is “the great equalizer.”

Pre-health advisors recommend that students take the MCAT soon after completing the core courses emphasized on the exam — typically their junior or senior year — and they also offer insights into prepping for and taking the MCAT in an application overview workshop.

Yarabarla recommends supplementing this guidance with a test preparation class — he used the Princeton Review’s MCAT Test Prep. “It’s a little expensive, but there are a couple of ways to do it,” he says. “The main value, to me, is all the practice tests they offer — it’s good to make sure you have the practice.”

The Whole Package

Required coursework: Check. Volunteering and shadowing: Check. Building relationships for letters of recommendation: Check. MCAT: Check.

Now it’s time for students to apply and show admission committees — through their transcript, resume, letters of evaluation, personal statement, and interview — that they have the passion, smarts, and stamina for medical school.

This is when uncertainty starts to creep in for many students — even if they’ve done all they can do to show they have what it takes, will the committee see it? Georgia Tech’s Pre-health Advising offers guidance throughout the application process to help students organize and strengthen their package.

The interview, especially, gives rise to anxiety, so pre-health and Georgia Tech’s Communication Center have teamed up to offer both traditional and new “multiple mini” mock interview opportunities, and students may also practice interviewing with med school representatives who come to Georgia Tech’s annual AMSA Pre-health Conference.

Yarabarla did two mock interviews at the Fair and one with a Pre-health advisor. “It’s very beneficial,” he says. “They treat it as a real interview and at the end, tell you what you did wrong and right. And you can do it before every single med school interview you have.”

Howell, too, did a mock interview through Pre-health Advising. “I found it very helpful and reassuring,” he says.  

The Final Stretch

The medical school application process can take up to a year and consists of three steps:

1)    The initial application — which could result in a “no” or a …

2)    Supplemental or “secondary” application — which could result in a “no” or an …

3)    Interview — which will result in rejection, acceptance, or wait list.

The average medical school applicant applies to 12 to 15 schools, and the annual nationwide acceptance rate hovers around 45 percent, according to Castelan.

Historically, Castelan says, Georgia Tech students who consistently seek pre-health advising are accepted at higher-than-average rates, and overall, Tech students are highly competitive — they consistently perform well on the MCAT, they are regularly admitted to top-tier schools, and they are often admitted despite GPAs that are slightly lower than the median for those schools.

So, how did Howell and Yarabarla fare?

Howell started medical school at the University of North Carolina in August 2016, and Yarabarla — who was also awarded the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship on top of his Fulbright — has six interviews pending.

Prior to joining ISyE, Paratchek was with Tech’s College of Engineering for over 10 years.

Lowe’s primary responsibilities focus on academic advising for ISyE undergraduate students, including both short- and long-term academic planning. He also works with ISyE student organizations, industry representatives, ISyE GT 1000 seminars, and teaches one class per semester.

Previously, Lowe served in a similar capacity in the industrial engineering department at Clemson University, where he also advised students and taught two classes per semester.

Lowe received his B.S. in management science from Georgia Tech in 1987, his M.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Florida in 2007, and his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Clemson University in 2015. 

Prior to ISyE, Hendricks worked at Georgia State University as an administrative specialist.

In addition to being a lifelong fan of the Yellow Jackets, Rockwell also nurtured a passion for “the beautiful game” – soccer – eventually moving from player to refereeing while a student at Tech and now on the professional level for Major League Soccer (MLS) games. He has been a referee for MLS for 12 years and a total of over 230 games. He is also one of nine people on the FIFA Assistant Referee list in the U.S. – a list he’s been on for 10 years – and is hoping to be considered as a referee for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

In this Q-&-A, Rockwell discusses his lifetime love for soccer, his refereeing career, and even how he uses his ISyE skills as a ref.

Refereeing for MLS matches is your passionate hobby, but tell us about your day job. Do you use your ISyE skills in your current work?

I started off working in manufacturing in Cartersville, Georgia. I worked as a nightshift supervisor, then transitioned to the plant industrial engineer. I worked eight years in manufacturing, then decided to take a corporate position in Scottsdale, Arizona. I am now the head of corporate audit for North and South America for my company.

I use my ISyE skills extensively in my position. Most of my audits are manufacturing based, as we look to ensure our factories are working in a safe and efficient environment. The human-machine factors, the attention to ergonomics, and the statistical analysis are skills I continue to use as I visit each new factory.

One key aspect has been communication. I find ISyE graduates from Georgia Tech are better equipped to make presentations and communicate with top management in the business world than other fields. This ability to communicate has been a huge asset for my career progression.

You have played or refereed soccer for what seems like most of your life. How early in your life did the soccer bug bite you?

I have been playing since I was seven years old. I was too late to sign up for American football, so my parents enrolled me in soccer. The team aspect and my love for “the beautiful game” have continued to fuel my passion for the game.

You played soccer for a couple of years on the club level at Georgia Tech, then switched to refereeing, where you’ve been ever since. Why the transition?

I transitioned because I needed to pay my tuition. I knew I would never get paid as a player, but I was doing pretty good refereeing on the side. I graduated from Georgia Tech with almost no outstanding debt and was able to pay for most of my tuition, meals, and residence through the money I saved refereeing soccer. But it was not easy. As my friends will tell you, I missed weekend activities and Friday night parties because I was on the field somewhere refereeing soccer.

You recently came back to Atlanta and refereed the inaugural Atlanta United game at Bobby Dodd Stadium. What was that experience like?

I could not wipe the smile off my face. I had a ton of friends and family in the stands which made it special. I think the coolest thing about that game is I asked at least 20 friends if they could go, and their response was, “We already have tickets to the game.”

I thought I would be much more nervous during the game, but once the whistle blew to start the match, it was time to go to work. It was game mode for me. Our referee team got the big calls right, so this made for a good celebration after the game.

Do you ever find that you’re able to apply your ISyE skills to being a soccer ref?

My professors in ISyE always taught strict attention to detail. This is a huge asset to have as an MLS soccer referee. After games, I analyze the video and watch my performance frame-by-frame to see where I can improve. Another fundamental of ISyE is root cause analysis: If I made an error, what is the root cause of this error? For example, was I out of position? Was I focused on the player instead of the ball? Was I blocked from seeing the ball?

Another key aspect is time management. Georgia Tech taught me about time management. As a student, I was very involved in student government, my fraternity, and other organizations. All this was on top of attending class, my ISyE project work, studying for finals, and refereeing soccer at nights and weekends to pay my bills. As a working professional, I have used these time management skills to juggle my personal life, my career, and my soccer refereeing. 

What has been your most thrilling soccer experience to date?

The game at Bobby Dodd was definitely up there, being at home – and in front of a sold-out crowd.

I also had a game last year in Toronto that I will never forget. It was a semi-final playoff game between Toronto and Montreal – a big rivalry – that was sold out with 36,000 people in attendance. Seven goals were scored during the game, which ended up going into extra time. As a referee team, we got all the big calls right, and after the game, there were no negative comments about the referees – only that it was one of the greatest playoff games in MLS history for all the right reasons.

To find a way to alleviate this problem, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, is hosting the second Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, or SC2. The goal of the challenge is to increase the possibility of access to Wi-Fi for both military and civilian wireless devices. According to the SC2 website, this will be accomplished when “radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, avoiding interference, and jointly exploiting opportunities to achieve the most efficient use of the available spectrum.” The challenge is designed to encourage sharing between networks through a combination of machine learning and communications engineering.

Enter Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures, one of 30 teams selected to participate in SC2. Spearheaded by two Georgia Tech professors – Matthieu Bloch, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) – the team comprises graduate students from both schools and comes out of the interdisciplinary Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT). The team is self-funded, but Bloch and Pokutta have received some support from the National Science Foundation in the form of an EAGER grant in the amount of $99,877, which will support the team’s early efforts.

Describing the Georgia Tech team’s approach to the spectrum challenge, Bloch said, “Here at Tech, we have expertise in both communications engineering and machine learning, and [the solution] that DARPA is looking for is something that integrates the two. The future of communication – for them – has to go through the integration of machine learning and intelligence, and that was a strength we were able to advertise to DARPA. They were happy with our approach because we were proposing an integrated solution from the beginning.”

In terms of solving the challenge through machine learning, Pokutta said, “If you look at machine learning in general, it’s a very powerful technique. At the same time, it’s probably overhyped. You have to create tangible value: applying it to real-world problems and solving them to have impact. It’s like having a hammer. A hammer is a great tool, but if you have nothing to apply it to, it’s completely worthless.”

In other words, the goal of the challenge is collaboration. Collaboration is important for solving SC2, but for Bloch and Pokutta, the collaborative aspect includes training graduate students to be interdisciplinary – to understand not only the nuances of machine learning or communications engineering, but to be fluent in both fields.

There’s something else that sets the Georgia Tech team apart: While Bloch and Pokutta are the professors heading up the challenge – Pokutta compared Bloch and himself to investors in a startup company – the day-to-day work of solving the challenge is led by graduate students in ECE and ISyE.

Jana Boerger is an ISyE master’s student who will graduate this summer before entering the ISyE Ph.D. program in machine learning in fall 2017. She oversees management of the project. From an ISyE perspective, Boerger said, “The challenge shows that the optimization methods we learn in ISyE can be applied to very technical real-world problems.”

But like Pokutta and Bloch, Boerger sees the value of an interdisciplinary approach. She added, “What’s also interesting is that while our team is all students, the other teams in SC2 are companies – heavyweight teams with a lot of money behind them. I think we as students can be successful if we work together, because we have this interdisciplinary team. Innovation happens when you combine two different fields together, like we’re doing. You need to look outside the box and see what’s there and take the tools and the knowledge and combine what you have.”

Pokutta elaborated, “The challenge is a learning experience that encourages creativity. We don’t just want to take something that’s out there and enhance it. Our strategy is to break with the current paradigms, start in the physical area, and redo everything from scratch with collaboration and spectrum-sharing built in from the start, not just as an afterthought to the technology.”

Keerthi Suria Kumar Arumugam is a Ph.D. student in ECE, and he is the communications team leader. Arumugam’s team builds the interface between the hardware components and designs the signal processing algorithms to push meaningful data to machine-learning algorithms.

He explained, “We make sure we can receive signals from the network, process them, receive insights from machine-learning algorithms, and suitably schedule packets that they can then be pushed to the network.”

Over the course of the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the 30 teams will compete in three preliminary competitions – in December of 2017, 2018, and 2019 – with a final competition in 2020, taking place in the recently constructed DARPA Colosseum. The teams have a chance to win as much as $3.5 million in prize money.

The Colosseum, as described by the DARPA SC2 website, is located in a 30-foot by 20-foot server room on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. It is “capable of creating a much larger, and critically important wireless world. If all goes as planned during SC2, competitors … will use the Colosseum … as a world-unique testbed to create radically new paradigms for using and managing access to the electromagnetic spectrum in both military and civilian domains.”

Bloch explained the idea behind holding SC2 in the Colosseum in terms of bringing together a group of people speaking multiple foreign languages in one room: “What DARPA wants is to put people in the room who aren’t speaking the same language. You have no information on what language the others speak. If I speak French and someone else speaks Chinese, there’s little chance that we understand each other. But the key thing – and this is where machine learning kicks in – is that we don’t have to fully understand each other. Maybe we just need to understand high-level features and communicate high-level ideas.”

Pokutta added, “If there are several people in the room, you need to understand when there is a pause in the others’ speaking so you can use that available time to speak for yourself. You don’t need to understand what’s being said; you need to understand when the language is creating gaps or holes you can use for your own communication.”

In the meantime, prior to the preliminary challenges, the Georgia Tech team will compete in “scrimmages,” or informal competitions against several other participating teams that take place in the Colosseum. The scrimmages will provide opportunities for the team to run trials using their own radio networks and to test their algorithms against one another.

Arumugam said, “The scrimmage is an excellent reality check on where we stand with respect to other teams. It is also a great opportunity to experiment with certain features and check how they fare against the other teams. Since the scrimmages are not counted toward the final score, they are essentially rehearsals. We are preparing the first draft of our design to compete against two other teams on June 21.”

Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature and approach of the Georgia Tech Agile Communication Architectures team, the group is uniquely positioned for success in developing and executing an integrated solution to the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge as it navigates the multi-year, multi-phased competition.

The students kicked off their study with focused time from Georgia Tech ISyE department heads in key areas including: Transportation and Port Logistics, the Physical Internet, Global Logistics, Health and Humanitarian Services, and they also visited several IRIM robotics labs. The students then visited a stellar lineup of companies with their leadership in Georgia including Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta, Porsche, Americold, and The Home Depot. They also spent time at the Port of Savannah with leadership from the Georgia Ports Authority, including a tour of the operations which recently received the largest container ship to-date. The students participated in the annual Georgia Logistics Summit, and further learned about supply chain successes and logistics innovations, along with 1,400 fellow logistics professionals!

From Professor Mac Cawley, “On behalf of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, we thank the Georgia Institute of Technology – Supply Chain & Logistics Institute(SCL) for hosting our graduate students during their recent visit in May. It was a great program for our Chilean group. The students gained many insights on U.S. practices and culture. The students really enjoyed their time in Atlanta and Savannah and valued the visits to the companies. They were impressed by the presentations, the company tours, the Q&A, and the passion for each organization mission. They enjoyed the welcoming hospitality throughout the visit. It was an excellent opportunity to share and to develop talent. The trip was a complete success. We look forward to next year’s trip!”

From Georgia Tech SCL’s Managing Director, Tim Brown, “We are pleased to be able to host our colleagues and students from Chile and have them interact with our our international student base in the Masters in Supply Chain Engineering program. Several of the visiting students have decided to join us in the program. We are grateful to our alumni and corporate partners who have been generous with their time and resources in engaging with the visitors. The program is a terrific showcase of Tech’s unique supply chain ecosystem. We look forward to engaging with the next cohort.”

Ozkaya’s experience with supply chain management (SCM) is deep and wide-ranging, including a stint at the UN World Food Programme as a supply chain expert advisor, and as a current advisor for the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, an Interdisciplinary Research Center at Georgia Tech.

In this interview, Ozkaya discusses his passion for and interest in supply chains, his motivation for starting SCW, and the future of supply chain management.

Beginning with your college education to your current company, Supply Chain Wizard, you have been deeply involved in supply chain management. What makes you so passionate about supply chains, and why?

Supply chain management is an intriguing field in every possible way. The more I learn about it, the more I love it.

First and foremost, it is an area that connects everything globally: people, products/services, countries, information, and of course, the money. SCM is like the operating system of the world.

The second reason for my passion is that SCM is complex, and it requires a significant amount of problem solving and analytical skills. This is a prime field for applying engineering skills combined with people and technology skills to solve real complicated business issues.

Finally, I love the integrated nature of SCM and its impact on actual business results such as revenues, margins, and customer happiness. As a “supply chain wizard,” I enjoy this final aspect the most — aligning and integrating all business functions so that companies reach their maximum potential.

You’ve worked in various supply chain-related roles, from NGOs like the UN World Food Programme to major companies such as McKinsey. What have your broad range of experiences enabled you to bring to your own company?

I have worked in every possible area of SCM including: demand management and forecasting; production planning and scheduling; warehousing and inventory management; logistics; network design; procurement; customer service; sales and operations planning;  and supply chain organization design.

Thanks to my Ph.D. work (advised by William W. George Chair Pinar Keskinocak) at Georgia Tech and my experience at McKinsey, I have focused on various industries with supply chain and operations projects and research such as health care; medical devices; high tech; consumer packaged goods; logistics; industrial engineering; and private equity.

At SCW, I wanted to bring my knowledge and insights of SCM best practices, while recognizing the need for industry-specific domain knowledge to add real value. I started SCW with the pharma industry as our primary focus, with an eye toward expanding our services to other industries over time. The key value I brought with me to SCW was the ability to see end-to-end supply chain operations and to bring systems-level thinking to any client situation.

Supply Chain Wizard is a fairly young company. Describe what it does and what motivated you to found it.

In 2013, I was driving from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Princeton, New Jersey, when I came up with the company name “Supply Chain Wizard.” I was returning from an invited talk I gave to Carnegie Mellon University business students on consulting skills. I started dreaming about how SCW could be a leading organization globally – a thought leader in the area of SCM and business transformations.

This is my first entrepreneurial experience, and I am dedicated to making it my last one, as I hope to retire from SCW and put my Ph.D. to use by teaching supply chain management at a university during my retirement years.

SCW is currently focused on supply chain traceability and supply chain security in the pharmaceutical industry. We help clients implement the supply chain infrastructure they need to secure their supply chains from counterfeit drugs. This is a major regulatory requirement in more than 40 countries.

Besides our consulting services, we are building innovative software solutions using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, Big Data analytics, and machine-learning approaches to solve our clients’ supply chain problems.

What is the secret to Supply Chain Wizard’s rapid growth and success?

We are one of the fastest growing companies in our industry, having captured some of the largest client accounts in the industry (including four of the top five U.S. generic drug manufacturers). The primary reason for our success is building a strong foundation of knowledge and expertise into repeatable processes using our software tools. We are not only providing client services; we are also providing software solutions to support our client services team, and eventually leaving behind these software solutions for our clients as a way to have sustainable impact.

Our aim is to digitize our clients’ factory and supply chain operations, so they can continuously improve their bottom line. We are now operating in five countries – the U.S., Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, and India – serving global clients.

What significant issues do you think will impact supply chain management in the next three to five years?

Supply chains are going digital already. I wrote a recent blog post about “Self-Driving Supply Chain (SDSC): 7 Technology Platforms That Will Take Over Your Job.” The key message of this article was about the supply chain automation that already has started with the self-driving cars movement by Google, Amazon, and other leading technology companies for automated deliveries.

This movement toward automation threatens traditional jobs as we know them, opening the path to a more advanced set of design jobs. We will see a significant push toward the automation and digitization of supply chains in the next three to five years. But this is just the start.

These trends will bring one of the most difficult challenges we see in SCM, which is the supply chain talent gap. We already have a major talent gap in the supply chain field, and these trends will widen that gap, at least in the short term.

Schools like ISyE – that have the ability to generate many talented supply chain professionals – will need to work closely with industry players to address this issue.

For example, when Dunkin was finishing her master’s degree at Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), she received a phone call specifically inviting her to interview for a position with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Boise, Idaho.

Did she want to move to Boise? “Not really,” Dunkin said in a recent interview, laughing. But her would-be supervisor persisted, and eventually Dunkin headed to Idaho and spent the next three years designing material handling and systems for HP’s R&D on laser jet printers.

Eventually, Dunkin had enough of Idaho’s extended below-freezing winter temperatures and relocated to Vancouver, Wash., where she remained for the next 17 years. During this time, she worked on a varied number of projects: software quality, R&D, operations, and then found herself back in IT, where she spent a number of years.

“I did cool stuff at HP – and got to see a lot of the world,” Dunkin noted. For her last project with the company, she worked as a program manager to help develop and bring an enterprise-class inkjet printer to the market.

“Inkjet printers are typically desktop-size printers,” she explained, “but they decided to build one that could serve as a full-size hallway copier.” Although the project ended up being discontinued for cost reasons, “bits of it are still out there in the guts of some office jet printers.”

From the corporate world, Dunkin took her career into the nonprofit sector. For the next five years, she served as chief technology officer (CTO) – which is equivalent to the corporate chief information officer (CIO) designation – for the Palo Alto, Calif. school district. “I was able to help about 15,000 kids in the district, so it felt like a great opportunity to make a contribution,” Dunkin reflected.

While in Palo Alto, she received another phone call – perhaps what some would consider the phone call: from the White House Office of Presidential Personnel asking if she had an interest in becoming the CIO for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Barack Obama’s administration.

When asked how getting that phone call felt, Dunkin said, “First of all, when the president calls, you don’t say no. Additionally, the EPA was the agency I wanted to come to, as an opportunity to serve more broadly. The EPA helps protect the environment for the entire world. Air and water don’t know any boundaries, so what we did didn’t just help the U.S. – it served the whole world. It felt good to do that work.”

Dunkin joined the EPA in August 2014 and while there, she oversaw the cultural transformation of the agency’s IT department. She described it as pushing the agency toward being agile, using the cloud, and “embracing the desire to move fast, make changes, and take risks.

“I never bought into the idea that the federal government is full of people who are lazy and don’t care. The folks I worked with at the EPA were smart, capable people, and they were deeply concerned about the mission of the agency.”

In terms of climate change – which is not the sole focus of the EPA, Dunkin was quick to point out – she said that “clean energy is coming because of market forces. There are states, cities, municipalities, and companies deeply committed to doing the right thing.”

So what came next for Dunkin after leaving the EPA at noon on January 20, 2017? Though – as a life-long philatelist – she considered a position with the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, she ultimately answered the call for a CIO position with the county of Santa Clara, Calif. Santa Clara is the 15^th largest county in the U.S. with a budget of $6.1 billion, and it represents the heart of Silicon Valley. “It’s the center of technology, and we need to tap into that technology. Counties are the lifeblood of the world: fire, police, jails, voter registration, social services, property taxes, and so on. [The job] represented a compelling opportunity,” she said.

As CIO, Dunkin is responsible for all of the technological infrastructure in the county, as well as how the public interacts with it. One of her goals is to increase the customer service aspect of the county’s technology – for example, making it easier for someone to pay their property taxes online. In addition, she wants the county to better understand its residents.

“About five percent of the folks in our community use the vast majority of the resources our county delivers,” Dunkin explained. “We see them in the health care system, in the social services system, in law enforcement. So we’re looking to use analytics to understand these residents better, and how we can help them use fewer services. This is not because we don’t want to provide services, but because in almost every case, quality of life goes up when fewer county services are used. No one starts out wanting to be put in jail or deal with child protective services or be in and out of the hospital. It’s very concrete – what we do has an immediate impact on someone’s life.”

When asked how she has thrived in the technology sector, which is famously male-dominated, Dunkin is very clear. “There is no doubt that there’s still a lot of sexism and ageism in Silicon Valley,” she said. While the general perception is that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, Dunkin suggested that the public sector is more favorable to women and minorities. “I think that how I’ve been successful has been partly in choosing to change my path forward to the public sector, where it was easier for me to get a chance at the jobs.

“The hiring process for federal jobs tends to be more ‘color-blind,’” she continued. “I think women continue to be underestimated and continue to find alternative paths. It’s still true that women and minorities have to be twice as good to get half as far.”

It’s clear that Dunkin lives out her definition of success: “Success is ultimately doing something that makes you happy, where you feel like you’re making a contribution that’s meaningful.”

Dunkin also makes meaningful contributions through her extensive involvement with ISyE. She currently serves on ISyE’s Advisory Board. In addition, the generous provisions made by Dunkin through her retirement account and her estate plans will provide permanent faculty support in ISyE. She attributes the beginning of her success to the education she received at Georgia Tech and ISyE. “I want to be sure future students have the opportunity to attend the best engineering program in the world,” she added.

IISE is the premier professional organization for industrial and systems engineers, and the Fellow Award recognizes outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering. Becoming a fellow is the highest classification of IISE membership.

About Edwin Romeijn

“I’m very happy to be recognized by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers with the 2017 IISE Fellow Award,” Romeijn said. “With this honor, my colleague Chuck Zhang and I join the esteemed company of others who have distinguished themselves through contributions to the field of industrial and systems engineering.”

As ISyE chair, Romeijn is responsible for overseeing ISyE as the nation’s largest industrial engineering program.

His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.

Romeijn is currently an associate editor of IISE Transactions. He is a member of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

Romeijn received his M.S. in econometrics and Ph.D. in operations research from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

About Chuck Zhang

Zhang said, “I consider the elevation to IISE Fellow, the highest classification of IISE membership, to be an honor and an acknowledgement of the accomplishments in my career.”

As a professor in ISyE, Zhang's current research interests include additive manufacturing (including 3D printing and printed electronics), cyber-physical systems, scalable nanomanufacturing, and multifunctional composites/nanocomposites. His research projects have been sponsored by numerous federal agencies including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Laboratory, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, and Office of Naval Research, as well as industrial companies such as ATK Launch Systems, Cummins, Delta Air Lines, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Siemens Power Generation. Zhang has published over 170 refereed journal articles and 200 conference papers. He also holds 23 U.S. patents.

Zhang received his Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Iowa, an M.S. degree in industrial engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. Prior to joining ISyE, Zhang served as a professor and chairman of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering.

Scholarships are awarded based on academic excellence, financial need, and involvement with women-focused professional organizations such as WIE and Society of Women Engineers (SWE), as well as other criteria (major, GPA, and citizenship) specified by each of the corporate sponsors.

 WIE Scholarship Recipients and Sponsoring Agency

Navila Akther, junior, Kimberly-Clark

Hannah Arents, freshman, Norfolk Southern

Lauren Boulger, senior, General Motors

Ingrid Cai, junior, Bosch

Eileen Chen, sophomore, Honeywell

Hannah Chen, junior, Eaton

Abigail Copeland, senior, BP

Sheena Ganju, senior, Georgia Power

Erin Gant, senior, NIIT Tech

Nataly Granados, freshman, NIIT Tech

Anushka Gupta, senior, Honeywell

Emma Heaslet, senior, BP

Danielle Hunt, senior, General Motors

Joyce Kinsey, junior, Rockwell Automation

Tina Lu, sophomore, Prof. Keskinocak Scholarship

Julianne McCallum, junior, Michelin

Prachi Mishra, junior, Arconic

Grace Oberst, freshman, Michelin

Ije Okafor, senior, Jane Ammons Scholarship

Marie Ozenua, sophomore, Rockwell Automation

Anna Smith, senior, BP

Rachel Smith, junior, Rockwell Automation

Charu Thomas, junior, Boeing

Charitty Tuttle, freshman, Prof. Keskinocak Scholarship

Alexandra Vezeau, sophomore, John Deere

But it's another high-stakes issue that has the Georgia Tech graduate-to-be a little distracted as commencement day nears.

In conjunction with his studies, the St. Thomas More alum has been working as an undergraduate researcher for a group hoping to influence health care legislation in the state of Georgia. Monahan recently helped conduct research for a bill that would increase access to dental-hygiene services for low-income children who are on Medicaid and save the state money through preventative care in return.

The legislation has cleared both the state House and the Senate and is in the hands of Georgia's governor, awaiting approval.

That whole experience — combing through data and recommending policy changes before he has even left campus — has been the highlight of Monahan's college experience. And it has made him a favorite among faculty at the elite Atlanta school, which ranks seventh in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of the nation's top public universities. (Illinois is 10th).

"Since my first encounter with Sean, he has distinguished himself as the type of student who is willing to go above and beyond in pursuit of knowledge," said Nicoleta Serban, Coca-Cola Associate Professor in Tech's  Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "He is particularly hard-working."

Read more about Monahan's undergraduate research and how he came to Georgia Tech as featured in the News-Gazette (Illinois): http://bit.ly/2qczJn8.

From an early age, Klaer has been involved in sports, whether swimming and playing water polo in high school or managing teams in college. Now, he is making sports the focus of his professional career. Klaer recently sat down for a quick Q-&-A about his time at Georgia Tech, his work with the Atlanta Braves, and how he uses his ISyE skills in his current role with the Atlanta Hawks.

How did you get started in sports management at Georgia Tech?

I was roommates my freshman year with the guy who managed the basketball team. His best friend was Daniel Miller, the former Yellow Jackets center, and Daniel mentioned to the head of basketball operations that I wanted to be a team manager – although I hadn't told him that! I ended up getting an interview, and that’s how I got into sports. I haven’t looked back since.

You were the assistant head manager of the Yellow Jackets basketball team. What were your responsibilities?

I didn't know what I was getting myself into initially. I was able to travel across the country with the team and visit different arenas and coliseums. In addition to setting up for practices and rebounding for shooting, the basketball staff also let me do some statistics work, which was really interesting.

You introduced the player efficiency rating, which is a metric used in the NBA but not so much on the college level. What is it?

It's a per-minute metric of how well someone's doing. A lot of people look at overall stats, for example how many points someone got in a game. If someone scores 15 points and played for 40 minutes, that’s an alright performance, but if they only played five minutes, then that’s exceptional.

It’s really breaking out all those numbers: points, rebounds, assists, steals, etc., and putting them into one number. Then you measure that number against the league average. It helped us guide playing time.

And then when you graduated from Tech you went to the Atlanta Braves. What did you do there?

I was in an 11-month customer relationship management trainee program for the Braves. The program was spread across all departments, so it’s one complete season, and you're treated like a full-time employee.

At the time, the team was two years away from the move to SunTrust Park. I was doing a lot of work regarding how to take our existing member base and transfer them from Turner Field to the new stadium. Members choose their seats based on factors we didn’t necessarily initially consider. For example, most people at Turner liked sitting behind third base because the sun sets behind the third baseline. That way they would get the shade earlier. In SunTrust, now the sun is on the first base side, and the first base is also crowded because it’s the Braves’ side.

So then you went from the Braves to the Hawks. What do you currently do for the Hawks?

I’m a sales analyst, and I do all the reporting that involves ticketing. This means reporting to the executive level how well sales are doing this year, how we're pacing toward the goal, how sales compare to last year, and then breaking the sales down into sub-categories: How are season ticket sales going? How are new sales versus renewed sales going? How are flex sales of smaller packages going?

Philips Arena is about to get renovated, so I've done a lot of research for that, trying to figure out what spots in the arena sell the worst and where we can improve.

How do you use your ISyE skills in what you're doing now?

Every year before the season opens, I get the game schedule and create ticket-sold goals and revenue goals for every game. I work primarily with “R” software – an open-source coding platform. I use a lot of regression techniques to predict those goals.

The hardest part of my job is that we have limited relevant data. We only play 41 regular season home games – 44 if you include pre-season – and it's hard to compare one year versus others. The “product” changes because the team comprises different players every year.

What are you most proud of in terms of your work for the Hawks?

I'm proud of the trust I've created within the organization. There was a moment this year when I had set some lofty goals for certain games, and a lot of people wondered what I was doing. But I said, “This is what my model says; just trust it and you'll see.” We actually exceeded my goal. It’s great to see the model I’ve created work out.

Finally, do you have any advice for ISyE students who are about to graduate or young alumni?

Don't be afraid to take the small jobs. When I started out with the Braves, I made $9.50 per hour – which is barely above minimum wage – and my friends were wondering what I was doing with my life, especially since ISyEs can make a lot more right out of college. But I really wanted to get into sports, and this was the chance that came along.

When I was making $9.50 per hour, I gave up doing some things on the weekend that I couldn’t afford, but at the end of the day I learned a lot. I'm in a better place now as a result of having taken that job. You never know where opportunities are going to lead you.
 

Almost 100 students initially registered for the competition; they then formed approximately 15 teams to compete in the first-round elimination. The finalists included seven teams of mostly graduate students, from a variety of disciplines across Georgia Tech.

The two winning teams – Na’Vi and Brew Crew – were composed of students from Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics program, which is housed in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering. Team Na’Vi included Harshit Amya, Rishi Bhatia, Arjun Mishra, and Vyom Vats. Na’Vi won first place and was awarded $8,000. Team Brew Crew included Parit Burintrathikul, Aaron D’Souza, Abhishek Khare, and Rishab Parashar. Brew Crew won second place and was awarded $5,000. Both teams received tickets to the Southern Data Science Conference, held April 7, 2017, in Atlanta, Ga.

The Master Modeler Competition was sponsored by Navicure. Serving more than 100,000 providers nationwide, Navicure is a provider of cloud-based claims management and patient payment solutions that enable health care organizations of all sizes to increase revenue, accelerate cash flow, and reduce the cost and effort of managing claims, patient billing and payments, and health care data analytics. 

Team Na’Vi and Team Brew Crew developed solutions to help Navicure better understand the payments processing and business side of health care services. Their insights and models will provide the head of data science and other executives at Navicure with different perspectives on how to leverage their data to improve patient experience as well as physician office efficiency.

This was actually Perini’s second application for an NSF graduate fellowship. As an undergraduate earning his bachelor’s degree in applied math at the College of Charleston, he intially applied and received an honorable mention. Perini was able to apply the feedback he received from his initial application for his successful second application. According to Perini, receiving notification that he would be receiving the NSF graduate fellowship felt “amazing.”

In a recent interview, Perini said that he initially considered teaching high school math but was “hooked early by OR and its applied focus.” He decided to continue those studies in graduate school. Originally from Atlanta, Ga., Georgia Tech was his top choice. “It was nice to come home,” he reflected.

His research project, which is advised by ISyE Professor Natashia Boland, is focused on multi-objective optimization. Perini explained, “Normally when you optimize, you’re focused on improving a single thing. For example, you’re either minimizing costs or maximizing efficiency. ‘Multi-objective’ means taking two or three objectives and improving all of them at once.”

Optimization is already used on a daily basis in such applications as airline scheduling, traffic routing, and traveling salesman problems. Perini gave an example of how multi-objective optimization works: “When you’re scheduling an airline, you can minimize the cost of sending everyone everywhere, and you want to minimize the stress on the flight crew as well. You don’t want them to get too stressed or exhausted while doing their work. So even if you gain a small increase in the cost of the scheduling but you minimize the flight crew’s stress by a lot, then it’s probably worthwhile to do that.”

Health care applications, as well as sustainability and social good factors – such as decreasing pollution or decreasing the use of natural resources – are other examples of additional objectives that can be considered in Perini’s research.

When asked about Perini’s award, Boland said, “This award represents very well-deserved recognition of Tyler’s exceptional abilities as a researcher, and of the potential power and reach of the research he is undertaking. His work in multi-objective mixed integer optimization is already at the frontier of the field, and represents an important first step in the paradigm shift from single to multiple objectives in mixed-integer optimization.

“This NSF graduate fellowship will enable Tyler to focus his time and effort on research, ensuring that the very substantial new developments he plans can be realized, and will help him grow into the future research leader he promises to become.”

Graduate Awards

Alice and John Jarvis, Ph.D. Student Research Award

Winner: Simon Mak

Honorable Mention: Can Zhang

Award presented by:  Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

I-Hsiang (Ethan) Lee

Award presented by: Brani Vidakovic, Professor

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award

Tony Yaacoub

Award presented by:  Dawn Strickland, Director of Student Services

Undergraduate Awards

Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers Excellence in Leadership Award

Alex Berry and Cole Sutter

Award presented by: Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor

The Evelyn Pennington Outstanding Service Award

Harshil Goel

Award presented by: Dawn Strickland, Director of Student Services

ISyE Alpha Pi Mu Academic Excellence Award

Alex Moran

Award presented by: Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor

Henry Ford Scholar Award

Michael Wang

Award presented by: Dawn Strickland, Director of Student Services

COE Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

Sean Monahan

Award presented by: Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor

ISyE Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award 

Nicole Redder

Award presented by: Natashia Boland, Professor

Kurt Salmon Scholarship in Industrial and Systems Engineering

Mario Wijaya, Anees-Carl Louis Ragy, and Robert Gwynn

Award presented by: Lauren Silver, Academic Advisor

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Entrepreneurship Award

Charu Thomas

Award presented by:  Aaron McHatton, KS2 Technologies, Inc.

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Innovative Technology Award

Anees-Carl Louis Ragy

Award presented by: Aaron McHatton, KS2 Technologies, Inc.

Georgia Tech IISE Student Chapter Student Awards

Outstanding Senior Award 

Anna Smith

Rising Star Award  

Joseph Levy

Most Successful International Student Award 

Jose Ernesto Chedraui

Outstanding Freshman Award 

Morgan Knowlton

Awards presented by:  Ida Mizani, President, Georgia Tech Chapter of IISE

During pandemics, scientists race to investigate infection mechanisms, facilitate early detection, and apply effective mitigations. Resources and policies for scientific, clinical, and technical advances must be coordinated to enable rapid understanding of all aspects of an outbreak in order to minimize damaging impacts.

Eva Lee, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare, has developed a biological-behavioral-operational computer model to help policy makers choose the best intervention strategies to rapidly contain an infectious disease outbreak. Her analysis covers the dynamics of disease transmission across different environments and social settings. The modeling system gives on-the-ground policymakers critical information about how to mitigate infection, monitor risk, and trace disease during a pandemic. 

Lee presented findings and policy implications from her research at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Mass. The research has been sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Lee’s presentation gave the results for Zika using her model, described by public health experts as “a digital disease surveillance and response” tool. The tool, Assure, can use many types of data, including biosurveillance, environmental, climate, viral, host, human behavior, and social factors. If genetic information for the disease carriers are available, they also can be incorporated. Lee explained how the modeling system provides the ability to predict disease spread, assess risk, and determine effective containment methods. In addition, it can help public health leaders optimize deployment of limited resources to help prevent and reduce the extent of future outbreaks.

“The containment of pandemics is fundamental to preventing a global epidemic,” said Lee. “Assure is a computational modeling tool designed for real-time support. By accepting real-time data, the model produces predictions that are customized to reflect a specific environment, policy, and human behavior on the ground.”

Referring to data related to the Zika outbreak in Brazil, Lee discussed which containment approaches are most effective there. Her model shows that the easiest and most productive way to contain the outbreak in Brazil is to the reduce the biting rate of mosquitoes by using insect repellents/mosquito-wristbands, wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants, and employing air conditioning and window/door screens to keep mosquitoes out. The result is practical. For example, the model demonstrates that only 20 percent compliance can reduce the total infection by half. This strategy is more successful than just widely applying insecticide and lasers to kill mosquitos. The model offers policymakers a decision-support framework to estimate the cost-effectiveness of each prevention measure.

The modeling system also underscores the importance of early intervention by revealing the timing of different interventions and associated outcomes. “Knowing when to respond and how it affects the outcome is essential,” Lee said.

Lee has shared some of these findings with federal officials, who recommended implementation of her resulting policies and strategies for Puerto Rico. She is also working with public health leaders in Houston, Texas, to identify high-risk areas and to optimize local surveillance and intervention.

Lee’s system can be applied to help contain a wide variety of epidemics, including not only Zika but also dengue, Ebola, and many other types. “The modeling framework accommodates various transmission mechanisms. This allows public health officials to adapt rapidly to changing disease environments and different emerging epidemics,” said Lee. As part of a continuing research effort, Lee is working with vaccinologists on vaccine immunity prediction to permit faster design and evaluation of new and emerging vaccines and to identify individuals either most likely or least likely to be protected by a vaccine.

An applied mathematician and modeling innovator, Lee has traveled to hot spots around the world as an advisor in response to public health catastrophes. She has long partnered with the CDC on medical preparedness and emergency response. Since 2015, she served on the National Preparedness and Response Science Board (NPRSB), the federal committee that provides advice and guidance to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The news briefing preceded the panel session Lee led entitled “Strategies for Public Health Pandemics: Science, Clinical Practice, and Policy,” which also took place at the AAAS annual meeting.

Team Oculogx is one of 12 U.S. finalists competing to be among six teams advancing to the World Finals for a chance at winning $100,000.

The team includes three students from the College of Computing – third-year Computer Science students Cheng Hann, Sarthak Srinivas, and Wenqi Xian. Second-year Industrial & Systems Engineering student Charu Thomas founded the startup company behind the team.

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is a global student tech competition that encourages students to use their creativity, passion, and knowledge of technology to create applications that meet real-world challenges with innovative solutions.

For the challenge, Team Oculogx introduces PickAR, a mixed reality app that melds Microsoft’s HoloLens and Azure MySQL database to improve order picking in warehouses. The app integrates waypoint navigation, barcode scanning, and direct communication with warehouse management software systems to improve overall efficiency.

Highlights from this week’s U.S. Imagine Cup student competition are going to be broadcast on April 27 as a virtual event hosted by Sabrina from YouTube's Nerdy & Quirky.

Kimbrough is finally back on Earth. The Georgia Tech graduate landed in Kazakhstan early Monday morning to wrap up a 173-day mission in space. As commander of the International Space Station (ISS), he circled the globe 2,768 times and traveled 73.2 million miles.

On Wednesday, already back at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, he spoke to Georgia Tech about the mission that began on October 17.  

“I feel pretty good today, much better than yesterday,” said Kimbrough, who earned his master’s degree in operations research in 1998 from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “My balance is a little off because my inner ear doesn’t know where it is. But I’m much more stable than I was on Tuesday.”

During his stay on board the station, Kimbrough conducted four spacewalks totaling more than 26 hours. He and the crew also welcomed five visiting spacecrafts — Kimbrough grabbed a few of them with the ISS’s robotic arm.

After nearly six months, you would think he would get some days off work. But the next six weeks are important, as NASA conducts experiments on him to learn more about how his body changed in space and readjusts to Earth. He will also huddle with researchers around the world to discuss the countless experiments he did on the orbiting laboratory. Only then will he get some much-deserved time away from the office with his wife and three children.  

“I’m looking forward to eating things we didn’t have on the station, like fresh fruit and vegetables. And pizza,” Kimbrough said. “I also can’t wait to take a run with my dog.”

This was Kimbrough’s second trip to space — he flew aboard the space shuttle in 2008. Georgia Tech has 14 astronaut graduates, tied for second among public universities.

This year, the CoE inducted six alumni from the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) on April 8, 2017: Alan L. Dorris, Elaine Ho Johns, John David Ratliff, Michael E. Tennenbaum, Maurice A. Trebuchon, and Annie McKay Walker.

Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni

The Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award recognizes future leaders from the CoE. They are on the “fast track,” having advanced rapidly within their organizations through their outstanding professional achievements.

Anne McKay Walker (BSIE 02), Vice President, Divisional Merchandise Manager, Over The Counter, Walmart Stores, Inc.

Walker received a bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech in 2002. She serves as vice president of over-the-counter merchandising for Walmart US. She began her career with Walmart in 2002 as an industrial engineer, and after spending two years with the Store Engineering team, she supported the replenishment division in several capacities.

Walker’s latest role in replenishment was serving as senior director of replenishment for the General Merchandise division. In 2012, she transitioned from Replenishment to vice president for merchandise execution, and she became responsible for developing and implementing strategies that support and drive the merchant strategy through to store execution. Walker sits on the ISyE Advisory Board.

Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni

The Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni honors highly placed executives who are actively involved in engineering, management, industry, academia, or government.

Elaine Ho Johns (BSIE 85), President and CEO, EnerVision, Inc.

Johns holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech. She is president and CEO of EnerVision, where she leads the company's nationwide consulting and business development efforts. She has more than 30 years of consulting experience in areas including strategic planning, power supply planning, utility rates, marketing, and economic analysis.

She is one of the founders of EnerVision, started its power supply business line, and currently leads its management consulting business line. Johns’ affiliations include the Council on Industrial and Systems Engineering, the Georgia Tech College of Engineering External Advisory Board, the ISyE Advisory Board, the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and the Women’s Energy Network — Greater Atlanta Chapter.

John David Ratliff (BSIE 81), CEO, Covance Drug Development

Ratliff earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech in 1981, and he received his MBA from Duke University in 1985. He currently serves as CEO of Covance Drug Development, the world’s most comprehensive drug development company and the only provider of full-spectrum drug development services from early-stage research to regulatory approval and beyond. Previously, Ratliff was president and CEO of HUYA Bioscience International. His health care industry experience also includes almost 10 years at Quintiles, the world’s largest provider of product development and integrated health care services, where he served as chief financial officer before becoming president and chief operating officer.

Prior roles throughout his career include CFO at Acterna and positions of increasing responsibility during his 19-year tenure at IBM. Ratliff supports entrepreneurial endeavors such as Remarque Systems, a provider of risk-based monitoring software solutions; Undercover Colors, a drug-detection consumer product line; and T3D Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical stage drug development company engaged in the development of a new orally administered treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Maurice A. Trebuchon (BSIE 86), Partner, PwC Consulting and IBM Global Business Services (retired)

Trebuchon earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 1986. He enjoyed a 28-year career in management consulting and business leadership, serving as a partner first with PwC Consulting and later IBM Global Business Services. With a deep background in supply chain management, strategy, and operational consulting, he has served in multiple North America leadership roles including retail industry leader, business analytics & optimization service line leader, and supply chain service line leader.

During his career, Trebuchon has primarily focused on assisting industry-leading clients in achieving business transformation via development of strategies, operational designs, leverage of information technology, and organizational change adoption. Today, he is the Edenfield executive in residence at ISyE, a member of the ISyE Advisory Board, and an advisor for Senior Design.

Engineering Hall of Fame

Individuals who are inducted into the CoE Hall of Fame have made meritorious engineering and/or managerial contributions over the course of very distinguished professional careers.

Alan L. Dorris (BSIE 70, MSIE 72, Ph.D. IE 74), Founder and Principal Consultant, Dorris and Associates International LLC

Dorris received his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech in 1970.  He subsequently received a master’s degree and a doctoral degree in industrial engineering, also from Tech, in 1972 and 1974, respectively. Upon finishing graduate school, he started an academic career by accepting a position as assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. At OU he taught a variety of industrial engineering courses and conducted research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation in transportation safety. Drawing on his Georgia Tech training in human factors engineering and ergonomics, he conducted some of the initial research into human responses to precautionary information and the motivation of safe behavior as a component of systems.

In 1978, Dorris accepted a management position with the JI Case Company in Racine, Wis., where his responsibilities focused on the safety of users of agricultural and construction equipment. In 1982 Dorris and his wife, Patsy, started a consulting company that grew to become Dorris and Associates International LLC (DAI). Over the past 35 years, DAI has provided management advice, product-design guidance, accident analysis, and litigation support to companies, governmental agencies, and law firms in the application of behavioral science findings to product design. An emeritus member of the ISyE Advisory Board and the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees, Dorris is a recipient of the Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award.

Michael E. Tennenbaum (BSIE 58, Hon. Ph.D. 16), Chairman, Caribbean Capital & Consultancy Corp.

Tennenbaum graduated from Georgia Tech in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, and he received an honorary doctorate in 2016. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He is the founder of Caribbean Capital & Consultancy Corp., a Puerto Rico-based private merchant bank that seeks to make active investments. Previously, he co-founded Tennenbaum Capital Partners, a leading specialty credit investor. Prior to TCP, he managed various departments of a major investment bank.

Tennenbaum is a member of the Smithsonian Institution National Board and a member of its Investment Committee, and he is founder of the Tennenbaum Marine Observatories. He founded the Tennenbaum Interdisciplinary Center at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, where he established the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Endowed Chair in Creativity Research. He is a former member of the Secretary of the Navy Advisory Panel and a recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award. He also has been a vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and was chairman of its Investment Committee; he is now a life member of its Board of Governors. He is founder of the Tennenbaum Institute for Enterprise Transformation.

He is an emeritus member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and the Georgia Tech Foundation Board of Trustees, where he was chairman of its Investment Committee. Tennenbaum is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni of Georgia Tech’s CoE.

Kimbrough served as commander of the ISS for the majority of the stay, joining Tim Kopra as the second Georgia Tech alumnus to hold the position in 2016. Kimbrough received his master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering in 1998.

Kimbrough and his crewmates traveled 73.2 million miles while in space. That’s 2,768 orbits of the Earth. Kimbrough conducted four spacewalks totaling more than 26 hours. His last one, on March 30, was the sixth of his career.

During the mission, he also captured cargo ships with a robotic arm, grew lettuce and flew a flag from Georgia Tech’s mascot, the Ramblin’ Wreck. He will fly back to Houston later today.

This was Kimbrough’s second trip to space — he flew aboard the space shuttle in 2008. Georgia Tech has 14 astronaut graduates, tied for second among public universities.

Georgia Tech is scheduled to interview Kimbrough later this week and will update this story after the phone call.

Major General Kelly McKeague was inducted as the Advisory Board’s new chair. He will lead the board for a one-year term.

Kelly McKeague, Advisory Board Chair

Kelly McKeague (BSIE 81, MSIE 87) retired in 2015 after a 34-year U.S. Air Force career which began in 1981. Following his commission from Georgia Tech’s Air Force ROTC program, he served in various industrial engineering positions. As a major general, his last assignments were leading the Department of Defense POW/MIA mission, which has worldwide responsibility for the analysis and investigation, search and recovery, and forensic operations to account for Americans missing from World War II to the first Persian Gulf War. McKeague is currently an independent consultant providing strategic and operational consulting to small-capital corporations seeking to develop business lines and/or product and services placement with federal agencies in Washington, D.C.

He and his wife, Nancy, reside in Alexandria, Va.

Alfredo Boratto

Alfredo Boratto (BSIE 89, MSIE 91) is an accomplished entrepreneurial executive with experience across top-tier companies valued for driving multimillion-dollar new business growth and investment programs in the technology, health care, and life sciences industries by leading investment, strategy, new business development, and sales and marketing teams.

Previously, Boratto was the segment leader for IBM responsible for new business opportunities and the creation of strategic relationships (including equity positions) with venture-funded emerging technology companies in the health care and life sciences arena. His prior positions at IBM included business development, sales, and strategy formulation roles for the health care and life sciences business units. Boratto has also worked for Tenix in Australia and Merck & Co. in the U.S.

In addition to his degrees from ISyE, Boratto earned an MBA from the Executive Program at Columbia Business School, and he is a graduate of The Wharton School Management Program from the University of Pennsylvania. Boratto is a dual citizen of the United States and Europe and is a native Italian speaker with a working knowledge of Spanish.

 Kim Felix

Kim Felix (BSIE 88) is vice president of information technology for UPS. Felix currently leads the enterprise computer, collaboration, and data services portfolio responsible for global computer operations, technology support, collaboration tools and services, IT practices, data strategy and services, and advanced analytics. Prior to her current assignment, Felix led the transportation technology group portfolio responsible for UPS airline, global brokerage, and global transportation technology solutions. She began her UPS career in the customer technology portfolio, leading teams in the expansion and build out of internet based applications on UPS.com, including the development of web services and tools used for customer integration services, shipping, and visibility solutions. 

In addition to her degree from ISyE, Felix has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California, a master’s certificate in project management from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Spelman College. 

Community engagement is a priority for Felix. She serves on the Overseers Board for NJIT and the United Way Bergen County Board. Felix is executive advisor for the IS African American Business Resource Group. She has a particular interest in STEM-based programs that encourage young men and women to enter the science and technology fields and supports and sponsors multiple activities including the VEX Robotics International Competition hosted in Louisville, Ky.

John McKenney

John McKenney (BSIE 90) is president and chief executive officer for McKenney’s, Inc., a third-generation, employee-owned business headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. He began his career with Trane. During his successful six-plus years with Trane, he served as a sales engineer working with consulting engineers, mechanical contractors, and industrial owners to design and sell commercial and industrial air conditioning equipment and controls. He joined McKenney’s, Inc. in 1997, and has held the positions of project manager, senior project manager, and vice president of Atlanta Construction, all before his current role as president and chief executive officer.

McKenney is recognized as a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus by the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. He serves as a trustee for the Atlanta Plumbers and Steamfitters Health and Welfare Fund. A member of the Atlanta Rotary Club, McKenney is a 2014 Graduate of Leadership Atlanta. He is past president, past board member, and current treasurer of the Mechanical Contractors’ Association of Georgia (MCAG) and board member of the Atlanta Area Council Boy Scouts of America. He served as an elder at St. Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Dunwoody and is an Eagle Scout.

Born and raised in Atlanta, McKenney and his wife, Janine, reside in Sandy Springs, and have two children in college.

Steve Necessary

Steve Necessary (BSEES 78) is executive vice president of product development and management for Cox Communications, where he has worked since 2005. He directs new development and lifecycle management for all products across residential and business portfolios. Previously, Necessary served as vice president of video product strategy, development, and management, and oversaw the conception, development, and deployment of new video products, including the company’s flagship Contour service.

Necessary is a member of Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), and Cable Pioneers. He is an emeritus member of the board of the Atlanta Ballet and Christians in Cable and is active in Mt. Pisgah United Methodist Church.

In addition to his degree from Georgia Tech, Necessary earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Debbie, have three daughters and three grandchildren.

Ronda Sides

Ronda Sides (BSIE 83) and her husband, Alan (BME 83), are pleased to return to the United States after living in Singapore, the UK, Japan, and China since 1997. Sides’ professional experience includes computer software customer and sales support with Management Science America; investment banking with Bear Stearns & Co; and corporate valuation consulting with Morris and Associates. She is the co-founder of Omni Technology Centers (later Extreme Logic), a computer software training and consulting firm and Microsoft reseller.

Sides and her husband have 33 consecutive years of Roll Call support, and both established scholarships in 2000 during the Campaign for Georgia Tech. Additionally, she served on the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees, was named to the Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni, and served as Georgia Tech Student Government Association president.

Sides and her husband live in Alpharetta, Ga. with their two daughters. In addition to her degree from ISyE, Sides holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

A refereed journal, IISE Transactions publishes original, high-quality papers with a strong methodological focus on real problems that impact engineering practice and research. The journal publishes research motivated by critical and complex engineering problems that arise in a wide variety of domains including manufacturing, service, public policy, health care, security, biotechnology, transportation, and others.

As editor-in-chief, Shi will be responsible for the technical content and direction of the journal, selection of the focused area editors and all editorial board appointments, oversight of the publication process of the journal, management of the IISE Transactions best papers awards, and enhancing the visibility and prestige of IISE Transactions. His goals for his EIC tenure are “to contribute to the prestigious reputation of IISE Transactions as a top-tier journal in our profession and to promote the frontier research of the industrial and systems engineering community.”

Shi said, “Special-focus issues will be the mechanism to promote new emerging areas and to nurture authorship, referees, and reader groups.”

He has also served as focus issue editor, interim focus issue editor, department editor, and editorial board member for IISE Transactions.

In an IISE news release, outgoing editor-in-chief Ronald Askin called Shi a “world-class researcher.”

“Shi has done an excellent job as the focus issue editor for quality and reliability engineering,” Askin said. “I’m confident his vision and energy will lead to increased quality and visibility for IISE Transactions over the next four years.”

Widely recognized for his numerous contributions to the field, Shi is an early pioneer in the development and application of data-enabled manufacturing. His algorithms integrate system informatics, advanced statistics, and control theory for the design and operational improvements of manufacturing and service systems by fusing engineering systems models with data science methods. The technologies developed in his research group have been implemented in various production systems with significant economic impacts.

Shi received IISE’s David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award and Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award and is a fellow of IISE, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, INFORMS (the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and an academician of the International Academy for Quality. 

The Red Cross partnered with a team from Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), which includes George Family Foundation Assistant Professor Turgay Ayer, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics Chelsea White III, Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil, and ISyE Ph.D. student Can Zhang, on their project "American Red Cross Uses Analytics-based Methods to Improve Blood Collection Operations." They have proposed and analyzed an alternate blood collection model to increase the amount of whole blood that can be processed into a critical blood product, cryoprecipitate (cryo), while reducing per unit collection costs. Cryo plays a critical role in clotting and controlling massive hemorrhaging, and is often used in the treatment of massive trauma and many major diseases, including metastasized cancers, cardiac diseases, hepatic failures, and organ transplants. After reviewing blood collecting and processing schedules, collection locations, historical yields rates, and donor-related factors, the researchers developed an advanced analytics-based approach that allowed them to study the potential benefit of the proposed alternate collection model.

The promising findings from this analysis later led to a decision support tool (DST) implemented by the Red Cross Southern Region, which serves more than 120 hospitals in the Southern U.S. The implementation of the DST resulted in a significant increase in the number of whole blood units satisfying the tight collection-to-process completion time constraint for cryo production. In particular, during the fourth quarter of 2016, the Red Cross Southern Region was able to process approximately 1000 more units of cryo per month (an increase of 20 percent) at a slightly lower collection cost, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in the per unit collection cost for cryo. This DST has recently been presented to the executives at the national level of the Red Cross, and plans are in place to extend the implementation of the DST to the 11 other American Red Cross regions in the future.

The Edelman Award recognizes excellence in applying advanced operations research and analytics to transform business and human lives. Edelman finalist teams have improved organizational efficiency, increased profits, brought better products to consumers, helped foster peace negotiations, and saved lives. To date, the finalists for the Edelman Award have contributed to a cumulative impact of over $240 billion.

The 2017 Edelman Award winner will be presented at the Edelman Gala on April 3, 2017, during the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Las Vegas. 

After tonight, the remaining two opportunities will be very brief, and the ISS will be low above the horizon.

Kimbrough will undock a week from Monday and land in Kazakhstan a few hours later. This will complete a mission that has kept him in orbit since October 19. During those five months, Kimbrough has captured cargo ships with a robotic arm, grown lettuce and flown a flag from Georgia Tech’s mascot, the Ramblin’ Wreck.

Kimbrough serves as commander of the station and is responsible for its crew of six. He will perform his fourth spacewalk of the mission tomorrow morning when he and fellow American Peggy Whitson go outside for several hours to install equipment for future cargo missions.

Kimbrough received his master’s degree in operations research from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering in 1998. He grew up in Smyrna, Georgia, and attended Tech basketball and football games as a kid.

This is his second trip to space — he flew aboard the space shuttle in 2008. Georgia Tech has 14 astronaut graduates, tied for second among public universities.

For 2017, the destination was Namibia, where similiar shipments of books were destined for school children. The occasion was provided by Glynda Ratliff, through her experience with Ultimate Safaris and its support of The Conservation Travel Foundation. To start the race, Bartholdi and his students went online to fill out shipping forms, then took the packages to a nearby branch of Intown Business Center which accepts shipments for UPS, FedEx, and DHL. 

Learn more about the project and see the final results.

The student project is sponsored by The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology

“That's always enchanted me because it means that I can start helping people and start building something useful even as a 21-year-old. I don't have to put in time, wait my turn on the corporate ladder, and then work on cool projects when I'm 40 -- I can do them today!”

Originally Bambot was planning to pursue what he describes as “the typical Indian kid route: go to college for engineering, go to med school, and become a doctor.” But through the strong encouragement of his parents, he enrolled in the TYE entrepreneurship program his senior year of high school and got hooked.

In this interview, Bambot talks about his leadership development through Georgia Tech’s business fraternity, Alpha Kappa Psi (AKPsi), as well as the idea for and development of InternBlitz, the startup for which Bambot and his partner are 2017 InVenture Prize finalists.

You were president of Alpha Kappa Psi (AKPSi) business fraternity. What have you learned from holding this position of responsibility?

Much of my leadership experience was cultivated in AKPsi. As president, I managed the fraternity of 70 people, oversaw our $80,000 annual budget, and made decisions to help enrich the college experiences of hundreds of students around campus. The biggest thing I learned from my time as president is how to operate in a field of enormous uncertainty: As president of an organization, there isn't really anyone that you can go to when things go wrong. Of course, there are people that can give you advice, but in the end, you're the one with the most experience in the areas that you're working in, and you're the one who has to make the final decisions. And even after you've made those decisions, you still have no way of knowing if you've made the right decision. 

Serving as president of AKPsi is what made me the most comfortable in running my own company. I learned that with all the uncertainty, the best way to succeed is to craft a vision that you truly believe in, rally everyone around your cause, and execute as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Another major thing that I got out of serving as president of AKPsi was learning how to sell. During my term, the fraternity was extremely short on money, and we were pulling pennies from couch cushions to make ends meet. One of the biggest initiatives I undertook was building out a sustainable corporate sponsorship program to help fund the events we held. We sat down with sales people around Atlanta and learned what enterprise sales processes looked like and worked to gear them toward corporate sponsorship.

Over the next year, we raised over $45,000, selling sponsorships to recruiters at companies like Salesloft, Capital One, Equifax, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and many more. Now, AKPsi continues to raise about $50,000 annually through corporate sponsorship.

Developing this program helped develop the sales skills I'd need to bring on a team and align them towards a vision. It also made me confident in knowing that once we'd built a product, we'd be able to figure out how to sell it to recruiters and turn InternBlitz into a true business.

You and your partner, Nathan Dass (CS 2017), are one of the six finalist teams for this year’s InVenture Prize. You were chosen for your creation, InternBlitz, which you describe as the “common application for internships.” Tell us a little more about InternBlitz and what it is, and how you came up with the idea for it.

I was looking for internships last spring, so I applied to 125 different internships. With every application, I kept entering in the same information over and over -- I knew there had to be a faster way to get this done. 

With InternBlitz, you build a profile with your name, email, and resume, and every internship you apply for on InternBlitz is prefilled with that information. That way, you only have to answer questions like "Why do you want to work at this company?” or “What are your location preferences?”

The goal was to create a platform that would allow students to send out internship applications ridiculously fast so they could spend more time prepping for interviews and learning about companies instead of just filling out the same information on forms over and over.

As we continue to build, we're also creating a machine-learning component to help students find the right internships more easily. Just as Netflix recommends movies to you based off what you've watched, InternBlitz will be able to recommend internships to you based on your profile, where you've applied, and what companies are looking for.

With InternBlitz, we're hoping to simplify recruiting. Our end goal is to have people send out fewer applications but get more interviews. 

What would winning the InVenture Prize mean for InternBlitz?

InVenture gives us $20K if we win. With that money, we'd be able to do three things:

• Sustain marketing costs to expand to eight colleges before the fall recruiting cycle picks up.
• Pay for servers as we scale up to more users (right now we're paying about $100/month out of pocket just for Georgia Tech users).
• Bring one or two dedicated developers to help us build out the platform. We need to be able to pay them a small stipend in addition to giving them equity. From what we've seen, each additional developer helps us pull in about 300 extra internships per month. 

Do you see yourself continuing as an entrepreneur after graduating?

Definitely! Ideally, I'd like to work on InternBlitz full-time when I graduate. 

If that doesn't work out, my hope is leave college and work with an early-stage software startup. I'd like to jump into a sales role (hopefully the second or third sales hire into the company) and help define the company's initial sales strategy, and then help them scale and grow out the sales team over three to five years. 

As human spaceflight inches closer to launching a Mars mission, onboard planning and mission adjustments loom large as potential issues. On a Mars flight, the communications lag time with Mission Control will be between four and 22 minutes, and astronauts need to be able to make some decisions on their own, especially in the event of an emergency.

When the best-laid plans need to be adjusted, how do astronauts reconnoiter?

This question is at the heart of "Technologies for Mixed-Initiative Plan Management for Human Space Flight," research conducted by three Georgia Tech engineering professors: Martin Savelsbergh, James C. Edenfield Chair and professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE); Karen Feigh, an associate professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE); and Amy Pritchett, David S. Lewis Professor of Cognitive Engineering in AE.

This research – which the team is just beginning to explore – recently received a two-year, $600,000 NASA Early Stage Innovation (ESI) grant. Together Feigh, Pritchett, and Savelsbergh will work toward developing technology that will allow on-board astronauts to develop their own short- and long-term plans for accomplishing mission objectives.

Feigh said that the team will focus on developing a computational structure and representation of tasks that astronauts must complete. Each task will be defined not only by its obvious demands, but by the constraints it creates. Tasks will be subdivided into sub-tasks and “sub-sub-tasks,” she said, to get the full scope of activity mapped out. The team will then develop a computational algorithm that can derive optimal short- and long-term plans to meet different goals.

Savelsbergh, who works on autonomous scheduling problems in ISyE, said, “The idea here is to explore mechanisms that support more autonomous decision-making. There are several challenging aspects to doing so. The aspect that I’m interested in most is the algorithms that make decisions or suggest decisions, i.e., automatically compute plan changes. This is especially challenging because plan changes have to be evaluated based on multiple different criteria. This is the part of the project where my expertise contributes most.

“Also, because we are dealing with astronauts, there is the question of how we interact with that individual. Our algorithms suggest changes to the plans; how do we communicate those decisions to the astronauts if we offer choices? Can they overrule what we propose? How can they convey information about what’s happening? In other words, how can the team structure and represent information so that communication with the astronaut goes smoothly?”

“It’s certainly an interesting problem,” Savelsbergh added.

Daniel Gurevich, an undergraduate in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) who is also earning a physics degree and math minor, is the only student from the School to have been named a Petit Scholar for 2017. He plans to graduate in 2020.

In the following Q&A, Gurevich talks about his general interest in science and his research as a Petit Scholar.

How did you end up at Georgia Tech?

I have always been interested in science and technology, and I grew up in Atlanta, so Georgia Tech was a great fit. I actually started taking classes at Tech in high school as a dual-enrolled student, and I loved the experience so much that I knew I wanted to go to college here.

Why are you a dual major in physics and ISyE?

Both ISyE and physics are based on using quantitative analysis to tackle important real-world problems. They are both about understanding and describing emergent phenomena, just in different contexts. Each field offers unmatched opportunities to improve our understanding through mathematical modeling and excites me in its own way.

How does it feel to have been selected to be a Petit Scholar?

It is truly an honor and also a recognition of the importance of the research I am working on.

Describe the research you are doing that led to your being named a Petit Scholar.

I am studying waves of electrical activity in biological tissues such as heart muscle and the retina of the eye. The ultimate goal of this research is to learn how to treat and prevent disorders such as heart arrhythmias, which affect millions of people worldwide and are the main cause of sudden cardiac death, responsible for 15 percent of global deaths.

What makes you most excited and/or passionate about this research?

What I love about my research is that it offers unique intellectual challenges while providing the opportunity for me to make a real difference in people’s lives.

How do you use your ISyE skills in this research?

The patterns of electrical activity that I study can be extremely complicated and difficult to record experimentally. Fully understanding these patterns requires both thorough analysis of large data sets from various experiments and mathematical modeling of different tissue types. These are just a couple of examples of how I apply ISyE skills in my research.

What do you for fun?                                                                         

I am a competitive chess player, ranked among the top 100 juniors in the world, and am the first board of the Georgia Tech collegiate chess team. I also play classical piano in my spare time.

What does the future hold for you?

For now, I am looking to finish my dual major and minor in math, and I plan to go to graduate school. My multidisciplinary education in ISyE and physics will give me the skills to solve a variety of important real-world problems. One problem I am particularly interested in is predicting when patients in intensive care units might crash based on their vital signs. A few minutes of advance warning could make the difference between life and death. ICUs gather a treasure trove of raw data for each patient, but currently there are no methods to identify when preventive measures need to be taken.

The $500,000 award runs through June 30, 2022. Xie’s project is titled “Quick Detection for Streaming Data over Dynamic Networks.” She plans to develop optimal or nearly optimal algorithms of detecting change-points for large networks.

Streaming data over networks has become ubiquitous in today’s world. A fundamental question is how to detect change-points (over time and space) from network streaming data as quickly as possible. This arises from a wide range of applications including geophysical exploration, social network surveillance, power network monitoring, multi-sensor systems for smart cities, as well as cyber security.

Currently, not much is known about how to model these data, how to design an algorithm through a rigorous theoretical framework, how to implement algorithms efficiently online, and how fast we can detect the change with false alarms under control. The proposed research will address these fundamental theoretical and algorithmic questions. The efforts will lead not only to novel technological advances but also help with a much wider interdisciplinary audience in related fields.

“We couldn’t be more excited for Yao upon her receipt of the NSF CAREER Award,” said Edwin Romeijn, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair at ISyE. “At this early stage in her career, she has already proven to be a talented teacher-scholar, and this grant will support the important and novel research she is conducting with streaming data over dynamic networks.”

About Assistant Professor Yao Xie

Xie’s research interests are in sequential statistical methods, statistical signal processing, big data analysis, compressed sensing, and optimization. She has been involved in applications for wireless communications, sensor networks, and medical and astronomical imaging.

Prior to ISyE, Xie served as a research scientist in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering with a minor in mathematics from Stanford University in 2011.