Thomas’ academic career began when he accepted a position with the University of Florida after earning his Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins University in 1965. He eventually became chair of the industrial engineering department at the University of Florida and shifted his focus toward administration. In 1978, he packed his bags and moved to Georgia to serve as chair of ISyE and begin his career with Georgia Tech.

“When Mike was hired, ISyE was certainly worthy of being labeled a strong program, especially at the undergraduate level,” said R. Gary Parker, ISyE professor emeritus and former graduate chair. “However, in terms of graduate education, particularly at the doctoral level — though solid — there was room for improvement. Additionally, Georgia Tech, as an institution, was poised to make a move, because its administration — under President Joseph Pettit’s authority — was also looking to move up to a higher tier.”

Thomas helped achieve that goal with his exceptional faculty recruiting skills that ultimately elevated ISyE to a top-ranked program. According to his many friends and former colleagues, Thomas’ greatest strength was his unique ability to identify and attract the right academic talent at various stages in their careers to ISyE. This included numerous faculty members who became leaders in their respective fields, including Professor Emeritus Ellis Johnson, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor George Nemhauser (who had been Thomas’ Ph.D. advisor at Johns Hopkins), Regents' Professor Emeritus and Co-Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center Donald Ratliff, and Professor Emeritus William Rouse, all of whom were eventually elected to the National Academy of Engineering — one of the highest distinctions an engineer can achieve.

“The most amazing thing about Mike was his ability to spot great talent,” said Nemhauser. “He was able to pursue and achieve excellence by identifying and hiring faculty, both young and senior, who were among the best in the field. He changed ISyE at the graduate/research level from pedestrian to among the top to the very top. While now almost all engineering schools at Tech are in the top ten, ISyE led the way.”

In 1985, Thomas worked with ISyE alumnus A. Russell Chandler III to create the School’s first endowed chair which was awarded to Nemhauser — one of the top operations research faculty in the U.S. — who  left Cornell University to join ISyE. Nemhauser revamped the doctoral curriculum and recruiting strategy, making it one of the best in its class. In addition to the robust curriculum, the unmatched quality of ISyE’s faculty helped attract top Ph.D. students, which further strengthened the program. Both of these factors helped propel ISyE to the number one graduate program of its kind — a ranking it has maintained for 28 years. The undergraduate program followed and became number one shortly thereafter and has retained its place for 24 consecutive years.

“Mike Thomas made a significant impact on ISyE, Georgia Tech, and the fields of operations research and industrial engineering,” said current ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “He leaves behind a legacy of excellence.”

Thomas left ISyE in 1989 to join the President's Office as acting executive vice president, responsible for overseeing Georgia Tech's academic restructuring, which resulted in the formation of three new colleges — the College of Computing, the College of Sciences, and the Ivan Allen College of Management, Policy, and International Affairs — and numerous new degree programs. In addition, he administered the implementation of many of the new degree programs; created new promotion, tenure, and reappointment standards for the Institute; and managed the budgeting process. In 1996 he was named provost and vice president for academic affairs, where he oversaw all academic and most administrative areas for the Institute.

“As the first provost of Georgia Tech, Mike Thomas shepherded a transformation that would build the foundation on which the Georgia Tech of today has developed,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “I have been honored to follow in his steps. He was a kind and caring man who will be missed.” 

Thomas retired in 2002 but came out of retirement soon thereafter to briefly serve as interim chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering while the search was underway for a new chair. He left retirement once again for Georgia Tech in 2010 when he served as interim chair of ISyE.

In addition to his many successes as an administrator, Thomas was also a leader in his field. He served as the 33^rd president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) in 1984 (which later merged with The Institute of Management Science to become INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). He received the George E. Kimball Medal for his contributions to the field.

In addition to his many leadership roles, Thomas also received numerous awards throughout his career. He was elected a fellow of both INFORMS and the Institute of Industrial Engineering; headed the Industrial Engineering Society; was made an Honorary Alumnus of Georgia Tech in 2000; and received the Dean's Appreciation Award from the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2001.

Prior to earning his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, Thomas attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering. He was a proud husband, father of five children, and grandfather of 22 grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that individuals consider contributing to a scholarship fund at Georgia Tech in Thomas’ honor.

Memories:

“I had the pleasure of teaching with Mike at Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GTL) one summer after he retired; what an amazing opportunity for those students to take classes with a professor who had such an enormous breadth of experiences. It also gave me the chance to personally experience Mike’s sly sense of humor over many French dinners with him and Pat [Mike’s wife].”

• Lawrence Jacobs, professor and associate dean for academic affairs, College of Engineering

“Mike possessed a steel-trap mind. Alice and I had a timeshare a few doors down from Mike and Pat during the same week for 25 years. We would each bring another golf couple and the ‘boys’ would play almost every day. Each night at dinner, Mike would replay for the group every shot of each player for the entire round. How he did it I will never know. Mike’s wit made him good at bantering, but beneath this facade he was one of the nicest individuals I will ever know.”

• John Jarvis, former ISyE chair and professor

“Mike was a huge Texas football fan. In the 60s it was much harder to follow sports teams in different states, because the television coverage was not like it is now. During his time at Johns Hopkins, Mike found the one place in Baltimore — at the top of a hill — where the reception was good enough to listen to the Texas games. During football season, he would spend every Saturday on that hill sitting in his car and listing to the game.”

• George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor

“Mike and I worked together since 1969, and although technically he was my boss for much of that time, I never really considered him a boss. I can’t remember any project that I wanted to undertake where he was not supportive. His mantra always seemed to be ‘do something and do it well.’ Mike was almost always in a good mood — I don’t recall ever seeing him really mad. It made him a pleasure to be around. He was an exceptional golfer and a huge Texas football fan. He was also a good friend, and we will miss him.”

Donald Ratliff, Regents' Professor Emeritus and co-executive director, Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center

“Mike never promised what he wasn't sure he could deliver. You could bank on his word, and sometimes he delivered more.”

• Craig Tovey, professor, ISyE

"I was always struck by and appreciated Mike’s good sense of humor, his loyal and steadfast commitment to, as he called it, the ‘Georgia Tech family,’ and his leadership that led to many outstanding and impactful contributions to the Institute and more generally to the fields of IE and OR. Although I could never understand his fondness for the food at Jalisco’s, a favorite luncheon spot not far from campus, it was always a pleasure to join him and others there for friendly discussion  I am one of many who will miss Mike at both a personal and a professional level and extend my deepest condolences to his family."

• Chip White, Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and professor, ISyE

Congenital heart defects are the most common birth defect, occurring in around one percent of births. They are the most common cause of infant deaths due to birth defects, and survivors often face health issues into adulthood. Congenital heart defects impact nearly 2.5 million children and adults in the United States. However, a lack of standard guidelines for either pre-, intra-, or post-surgical care had resulted in substantial inconsistencies in surgical outcomes among different health care centers. To remedy this, PHN (which is funded by NHLBI) partnered with ISyE to create and implement clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to reduce inconsistent cardiac surgical outcomes and improve the care of children who require heart surgery.

“This marks the first time a network of pediatric clinical sites has been selected as a Franz Edelman finalist. The Georgia Tech team is extremely honored to be working alongside these outstanding clinicians who are dedicated to advancing clinical care and saving the lives of these fragile children,” said Georgia Tech Professor Eva Lee. Lee is the director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, a center established by sponsorship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Whitaker Foundation. Lee first won the Edelman Award in 2007 with Dr. Marco Zaider from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute for innovative advances in cancer treatment.  

“To be selected as a Franz Edelman finalist, which recognizes the greatest achievements in operations research and analytics, is an incredible testament to the hard work and dedication of so many,” said Dr. Gail Pearson, PHN director and associate director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at NHLBI.  “We are tremendously honored that our application of operations research to improving the lives for patients with congenital heart defects has had such an impact.”

“To be named as a finalist is an incredible honor and a strong testament to the value of developing novel strategies to advance medical outcomes,” said Dr. William Mahle, Marcus Professor of Pediatric Cardiology of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA). Dr. Mahle is the principal investigator of this project leading the clinical implementation. “We’re proud to be part of the PHN, which facilitates strong relationships between pediatric institutions across the country to foster collaboration and innovation. This project far exceeded our expectations, and we hope that this model of exchanging ideas and best practices across industries can lead to many more improvements in healthcare, including pediatric cardiac care, for years to come.”

The collaborative project, entitled “Collaborative Systems Analytics: Establishing Effective Clinical Practice Guidelines for Advancing Congenital Cardiac Care,” aims to decrease the time patients require intensive care, because long stays in the ICU are associated with both short- and long-term complications. The work showed that early removal of breathing tubes and lowering the rate of reintubation are key factors to swifter and fuller recoveries.

The study, which began in 2010, resulted in clinical practice guidelines for pre-, intra-, and post-surgical care of patients with congenital heart defects. The ISyE analytics team, led by Lee, along with her doctoral and undergraduate students, were in charge of devising a customizable model and decision support framework that combines systems modeling, simulation-optimization decision analytics, clustering and machine learning, and influence networks within a collaborative learning paradigm to improve clinical outcome. The team objectively observed, analytically pinpointed, and prioritized potential areas for focused collaborative learning. One of the key factors identified is early extubation (removal of the breathing tubes). 

Cardiac patients often have their breathing tubes left in place for hours or days after heart surgery, thereby leaving them attached to a mechanical ventilator. Through round-robin site visits, deep learning, and consensus building, the team established a clinical practice guideline to reduce practice variation by extubating patients within six hours of admission to the cardiovascular ICU.

The team implemented the advanced practice of early extubation at four congenital heart programs through North America, including CHOA, in 2014. The new approach resulted in a reduced need for the mechanical ventilator following surgery, with the majority of patients able to breathe on their own within hours after surgery.

Additionally, the newly adopted strategy resulted in reduced (37-55 percent) need for pain medication (including opioid medications such as fentanyl), decreased time (24 percent) in the ICU, faster feeding (37 percent) by mouth post-surgery, and greatly reduced hospital costs for cardiac patients across participating sites (up to 27 percent, or $13,500 per surgical procedure).

“Across disciplines, there is an increased emphasis on both improving quality and reducing costs. This early extubation CPG has unique potential to improve value in infant heart surgery by both improving clinical outcomes and reducing costs.” said Lee. “It is rather unusual that such cost savings are realized so rapidly. This is very exciting, as it proves that sophisticated analytics can prioritize and help clinicians to focus on those factors that matter most.”

This work is partially supported by grants from the NSF and the NIH.

This year’s Edelman Award finalists include innovative projects by Intel, the Federal Communications Commission, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., China National Petroleum Corporation, and Europcar. Lee, along with Drs. Michael Gaies of Mott Children’s Hospital, Pearson, and Mahle, presented the findings to a panel of judges in Baltimore, Maryland on April 16. The annual event drew over 1,000 attendees composed of the world’s leading professionals in analytics and operations research.

Deep learning has been a major driving force in the recent surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. While deep learning has resulted in tremendous empirical success, the theoretical understanding of deep learning remains an important research field rife with opportunity.

“In other words, understanding why and how AI works or doesn’t work is not clear,” said Xiaoming Huo, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and executive director of TRIAD.

“The theory needs significant development, so the workshop brought together people who have been working on this problem and enabled them to exchange ideas,” he noted.

The workshop’s interdisciplinary focus was reflected in both the diversity of speakers, including experts in fields ranging from statistics and optimization to computer science and applied mathematics, and its sponsors, which included ISyE; Georgia Tech’s colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Big Data Institute; the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI); and the American Statistical Association (ASA).

Promising ideas on the theoretical foundation of deep learning have emerged, and the TRIAD workshop provided an avenue for researchers in related fields to review existing work, communicate new results, and seek new research directions.

About TRIAD

TRIAD is a cross-disciplinary institute that was established in 2017 as part of the National Science Foundation’s TRIPODS (Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science) program. TRIAD unites statistics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science to further develop the foundations of data science. TRIAD brings together senior, mid-career, and junior faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, all from Tech’s colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences, and data science practitioners-at-large using focused working groups, national and international workshops, and organized innovation labs.

To deal with the problem of HCW shortages, the TFGH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Mozambique Ministry of Health (MOH) joined forces.Their efforts were supported by a team from Georgia Tech, which included graduate and undergraduate students, former ISyE faculty member Julie Swann, and was led by Professor Pinar Keskinocak, a faculty member in ISyE and the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

They jointly developed a solution, called the Workforce Allocation Optimization (WAO) Tool. At the core of WAO is an integer programming model, which is solved to find the best allocation of HCWs to match demand and supply, considering various constraints, objectives, and preferences.

Currently, ISyE alumna Sheereen Brown (BSIE 13, MSHS 14) serves as a business analyst for the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII), a program of TFGH. She works with a team that led implementation of the tool in Mozambique. What makes the tool particularly special is that for the first time, HCW placement preferences are taken into account.

“Previously, in Mozambique, there was a very top-down approach to allocation, without any data to drive that process,” said Brown. “There was no preference data from the HCWs — nobody got a say in where they went.”

The problem with this approach is that once HCWs were placed somewhere, they would immediately apply for a transfer so they could go to a district of their choice.

The Excel-based WAO tool — specifically designed this way so developing countries don’t have to spend a lot of money on expensive specialized software — tackles the HCW allocation problem from two sides: where the need is greatest and where workers want to be placed.

In December 2015, Mozambique’s MOH put the allocation tool in place to great success. By asking HCWs their top three preferences for placement within the country, over 75 percent of HCWs were satisfactorily placed in one of their top three preferences. In the spring of 2018, a team from TFGH traveled to Zambia and Tanzania to train MOH officials on how to use the tool, which they received in a cloud-based portal.

“In Zambia, the allocation process typically takes 14 days annually,” Brown said. “The WAO tool will cut that down significantly, with the ability to allocate workers in minutes.” The tool has not yet been fully implemented in Zambia, so she described the tool’s impact as currently “a potential success.”

“The MOHs in all three countries are working with PHII/TFGH and African-based software development firms to integrate the tool within the MOHs’ existing information systems,” Brown added.

At the Expo, Senior Design team Cox Automotive took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award. From among the 23 teams, three – Grady, Textronomists, and Trash Talk – were selected as finalists in the ISyE Best of Senior Design competition. Grady was chosen as the first-place winner.

“The impact and the breadth of the Senior Design projects are truly remarkable, ranging from developing a strategy for disrupting the transmission of rabies in Haiti, reducing truck dispatch delays for a major 3PL, to creating the system design for mobile ordering services at a major league sports stadium,” said ISyE Director of Professional Practice and Senior Design Coordinator Dima Nazzal. “Through our Senior Design program, ISyE has a very large impact on society, both locally and globally.  We are very proud of our students!”

Senior Design team Grady worked alongside Grady Memorial Hospital staff from the infusion center, pharmacy, and laboratory, seeking ways to increase the number of infusion patients served per week and reduce the appointment lead time. New scheduling practices were identified and evaluated that promise to increase the infusion center throughput by as much as 39 percent and support Grady’s journey toward becoming a nationally ranked hospital.

“I had a wonderful experience working with this dedicated and talented team. Their award is a testament to their intellect and perseverance,” said Dr. Jennifer Brandt, a rheumatologist at Grady Memorial Hospital. “They asked excellent questions and had a unique perspective that fostered important conversations among the various teams involved at the infusion center including pharmacy, laboratory, and nursing. Their suggestions have the potential to make a large impact for throughput at the Grady Memorial Hospital Infusion Center now and in the future.”

The team members included Ayush Agrawal, Vivek Jajoo, Kendall McRae, Nihal Shah, Rohil Shah, Mauricio Taborga, Michael Wang, and Kexin Zhang. They were advised by Professor Emeritus Leon McGinnis.

Senior Design team Textronomists’ project goal was to increase the throughput of Textron’s small baggage tractor production line by reducing the number of missing parts in the warehouse. The team created an inventory management model and Kanban system, as well as a redesigned material storage layout. Upon implementation, Textron’s daily tractor production will increase by five percent, enabling them to reduce their backlogged orders and increase annual profit by $1.2 million.

Team members included Raianna Brown, Brenna Fromayan, Frank Johnson, Susannah Jordshaugen, Faiyaz Khimani, Sunmin Kim, and Joshua Wilkerson. They were advised by Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Kamran Paynabar.

Senior Design team Trash Talk worked with Mercedes-Benz Stadium on their Zero Waste Initiative to develop a plan for a Zero Waste Super Bowl in February. To accomplish this, the stadium must divert 90 percent or more of its waste away from landfills through reusing, recycling, and composting. The team focused not only on creating a one-time Zero Waste solution but also on implementing processes and improvements that would allow every event to potentially be Zero Waste. 

Team members included Wilson Harmond, Savannah Harris, Mallory Hu, Ashley Ko, Austin O’Farrell, Sydney Phillips, Jakob Robinson, and Jordan Shollenberger. They were advised by Professor Gamze Tokol-Goldsman.

Senior Design team Cox Automotive, which took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award at Capstone, worked with Meridian Remarketing, a subsidiary of Cox Automotive, to meet the rise in demand by increasing the scalability of and confidence in their decision process. This team used statistical modeling to support Meridian Remarketing in vehicle valuation and deciding whether to transport or recondition a vehicle. By supplementing their current system with statistically driven decisions, Meridian Remarketing can support the growth of Cox Automotive and a potential increase of $8 million in revenue in 2019.

"The Georgia Tech Senior Design team analyzed a largely informal vehicle remarketing process, and using historical data, was able to identify key decision points and quantify the potential cost savings to Cox Automotive," said Brett Carpenter, senior director of data science at Cox. "The team delivered a solid foundation upon which our data science team can build. A consistent, predictable process that simplifies or automates manual decision-making is critical to our remarketing business as volumes continue to grow in 2019 and beyond."

Team members included Maggie Jennings, Alan Johnson, Kelly Kronenberger, Sidd Meka, Will Olsson, Ashley Paek, Meghan Rathie, and Zoe Stein. They were advised by Associate Professor Yajun Mei.

The Wiener Prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense. The prize was established in 1967 in honor of Professor Norbert Wiener and was endowed by a fund from the Department of Mathematics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"On behalf of the College of Engineering, we would like to congratulate Arkadi on his 2019 Norbert Wiener Prize,” said Steve McLaughlin, dean of the College and Southern Company Chair. “We are delighted that his exceptional work has been acknowledged. This recognition by your peers, both nationally and internationally, is an important milestone.”

“Congratulations to Arkadi on winning the 2019 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “The fundamental contributions he has made to continuous optimization during his career have significantly shaped the field. Arkadi more than deserves this prestigious award.”

A powerful and original developer of the mathematics of high-dimensional optimization, Nemirovski, with D. Yudin, invented the ellipsoid method used by Leonid Khachiyan to show for the first time that linear programs can be solved in polynomial time. With Yurii Nesterov, he extended interior‐point methods in the style of Narendra Karmarkar to general nonlinear convex optimization. This foundational work established that a rich class of convex problems called “semidefinite programs” are solvable in polynomial time. Semidefinite programs are now routinely used to model concrete applied problems and to study deep problems in theoretical computational complexity. A third breakthrough, with Aharon Ben-Tal, was the invention of methods of robust optimization to address problems in which the solution may be very sensitive to problem data.

Nemirovski also, and rather amazingly, made seminal contributions in mathematical statistics, establishing the optimal rates at which certain classes of nonparametric signals can be recovered from noisy data and investigating limits of performance for estimation of nonlinear functionals from noisy measurement.

His contributions have become bedrock standards with tremendous theoretical and practical impact on the field of continuous optimization and beyond.

“I am deeply honored and grateful to receive the 2019 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics – a distinction I never dreamt of,” said Nemirovski. “As a student, I have been fortunate to be taught by brilliant mathematicians by the mechanical and mathematical faculty of Moscow University, where I was mentored by Georgi Shilov. During my professional life, I have had the honor and privilege to collaborate with outstanding colleagues, first and foremost, with Yuri Nesterov, Aharon Ben-Tal, and Anatoli Iouditski, to whom I am extremely grateful for their indispensable role in our joint research and for decades of friendship. I owe a lot to the excellent working conditions I enjoyed at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute in Moscow, at Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology – and at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“I always thought that the key word in ‘applied mathematics’ is ‘mathematics.’ Even when all we need at the end of the day is a number, I believe that what matters most are rigorous results on how fast this number could be found and how accurate it is, which poses challenging and difficult mathematical problems.

“I am happy to observe how my research area – convex optimization – thrives due to the effort of new generations of researchers, and how the scope of its applications is rapidly extending,” Nemirovski added.

Since 2005, Nemirovski has been a professor at ISyE. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of the Fulkerson Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) and AMS (joint with L. Khachiyan and D. Yudin), the Dantzig Prize of MPS and SIAM (joint with M. Grötschel), and the John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) (joint with M. Todd). He shares the 2019 Norbert Wiener Prize with Marsha Berger.

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

Sokol grew up in northeastern New Jersey and says that while he took to engineering, math, and computer science as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, analytics wasn’t initially on his radar.

“My first two to three years of college, I had no idea what I wanted to major in,” Sokol said. “One of my roommates was required to take a course on optimization (these days, it's a big part of analytics, but of course analytics wasn't a buzzword back then), and he convinced me to take it with him because he thought it sounded like the sort of thing I'd enjoy. So I took the course, and as we learned more and more about how the material could be applied to so many different real-life situations, I knew more and more that this is what I want to do.”

Sokol graduated in 1994 with three majors in Applied Sciences in Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science. He went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research. He made the move to Georgia Tech back in 1999. Here, his research has focused primarily on applied analytics – leveraging mathematical modeling, operations research, and statistics to streamline and improve operations in a number of fields – including professional sports.

In fact, Sokol has worked with teams or leagues from all three major American sports with decision making and system designs. One example of Sokol’s work is aiding decision-making in drafting players. “Before the draft, a team’s experts disagree about which players will be better for the team, and which players there's more uncertainty about,” Sokol said. “How do they combine all of those opinions into an overall draft priority and value those players compared to draft picks and potential trades?” Some of Sokol’s other work includes determining teams’ playoff chances (and how can they improve them), how teams should use their tracking data from games and practices, and how to rank teams that haven’t played each other. On this last topic, Sokol’s Logistic Regression Markov Chain (LRMC) predicative modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament continues to stand as an industry leader and has received significant publicity.

In addition to sports analytics, Sokol’s work also impacts the world of personalized medicine and surgical intervention. 

“Some of the work that I'm doing right now is around organ transplants,” Sokol said. “We're looking at better ways of predicting, given a specific organ and a specific potential recipient, how long might that recipient live if he or she takes the organ to be transplanted. This can help patients and physicians make better decisions about whether they should take organs that are offered, and help make better matches between patients and organs that are available for transplant.”

These analytics applications, Sokol said, could improve medical outcomes and help ensure successful organ transplantation – saving lives in the process.  

Ask other learners at Georgia Tech about Joel Sokol, however, and they’ll likely focus on his other major achievements: teaching,  curriculum development, and guiding future and current industry professionals along their educational paths.

For these efforts, he earned recognition from both the Institute of Industrial Engineers (now the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers) and the National Academy of Engineering – as well Georgia Tech’s biggest teaching awards. Most recently, he was honored with the inaugural MS Analytics Outstanding Faculty Award. He also served two terms as vice president of education for the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), where he also served as founding officer of its sports operations research section.

Sokol has watched online learning explode during his time with Georgia Tech – and he’s continuing the trend with the Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMS Analytics).

Sokol directs both the traditional, on-campus MS Analytics program and its online counterpart. He attributes the success of OMS Analytics to both the value of the degree and the overall experience. While someone who has never experienced it might dismiss online learning as “just videotaping a lecture,” the full package entails faculty content experts, instructional designers, online format experts, graphic designers, and video producers all interacting to create an outstanding educational experience.

OMS Analytics marks Sokol’s first dive into the world of online teaching, but he’s embraced it fully. He believes the experience improved his overall teaching ability, continuing his nearly two decades of commitment to Georgia Tech.

The experience has also given Sokol insight into other application areas for analytics, such as the railroad and petroleum industry. Plus, the resulting professional connections are also rewarding.  

“I have 600 people in my online course this semester, and it's just going to get bigger,” Sokol said. “A few years down the road, all these people will be working in analytics, and that range of professional connections will be great. I think in general that's a big benefit, both for me and for everyone in the cohort.”

It’s also a future in which analytics itself will continue to revolutionize the way industries make decisions and respond to change.

“I think there's going to be a lot more emphasis on using analytics for fundamental decision-making in a lot more ways,” Sokol said. “And down the road, I also think that the impact of people, with all of our quirks, will be taken into account better than it is now.”

Maria Basabe serves as Walmart's Sr. Director Health & Wellness (H&W). Her main focus is to improve profitability via enablement of better and faster decisions fueled by data analytics, improved processes and technology. She joined Walmart in 2010 and was responsible for leading large transformational initiatives in Merchandising and Operations. Before joining Walmart, Maria was a Director with The Home Depot where she led multiple initiatives in Development of New Store Formats, Business Development, and Pricing. She started her career with Accenture in the Supply Chain Strategy Practice. Maria earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, her Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering from The Georgia Institute of Technology in Georgia.

David Stuver is Executive Vice President, Business Development & Supply Chain Solutions at Americold. Prior to joining the company, Mr. Stuver was VP-Distribution Support and Engineering for SUPERVALU. He also worked as a Process Improvement Engineer with PepsiCo, and in increasing roles of responsibility with Borders. Previously, Mr. Stuver served as a US Army Combat Engineer Officer Captain in Germany and Iraq. Mr. Stuver holds an MS in Management from the University of Southern California, and a BS in Industrial Systems Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Mr. Stuver also currently serves on the Board of Directors for the World Food Logistics Organization and the University of Georgia's full time MBA Supply Chain and Operations track board.
 

As a teenager, she briefly rebelled against the idea of going to Georgia Tech, but came around to it when she decided to pursue engineering — which turned out to be, she says, the best decision ever.

Hooper hiked, climbed, and trekked all over the country on her way to serving as president of ORGT. She graduated this weekend with a bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering.

“There’s great power in getting outside and getting off campus for a little bit.”

In 2013, it began with 40 students chosen from among 75 applicants. The program was a response from one of the country’s most respected academic institutions to the rapidly expanding field of analytics. Today, with 85 students on-campus and more than 1,000 online learners, Georgia Tech celebrates the fifth year of its growing Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) program. The impact this program has had for companies and industries has been felt throughout the U.S. and beyond.

In November, MSA alumni, professors, current students, and staff, along with business leaders and other supporters, gathered at The Carter Center in Atlanta to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the MSA program and the great accomplishments of its graduates.

The interdisciplinary program began as one of just a few in the country, leveraging Georgia Tech’s strengths in statistics, operations research, computing, and business, by combining the world-class expertise of the Scheller College of Business, the College of Computing, and the College of Engineering.

Joel Sokol, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the MSA program, said the interdisciplinary aspect is what sets it apart and makes its students poised for success.

“We have a truly interdisciplinary program — it’s owned equally by computing, business, and engineering, so we expose our students to all three of those perspectives of analytics,” Sokol said. “Even more importantly, according to employers, we also work hard to teach the integration of those perspectives, so our students can have a significant impact in a wide variety of different job tasks and follow a wide range of career paths. Our approach also helps our students to be well-positioned to rise within in their companies or organizations.”

Students have the opportunity to choose from more than 70 electives, in which they learn directly from top international authorities on business intelligence, developers of cutting-edge analytics techniques in statistics and operations research, and world leaders in big data and high-performance computing. Students use advanced resources across campus, including Georgia Tech’s state-of-the-art high-performance computing infrastructure for massive-scale data analytics, and work in cross-disciplinary teams to solve real analytics problems for a range of companies and organizations. This adds up to a unique ability to generate deeper insights into analytics problems.

Not only does the program showcase a wide variety of learning opportunities, the students themselves come from diverse backgrounds, Sokol said.

“We've designed our program so that even people without an analytics-related background succeed and come out prepared for professional success,” he said. “Students with academic backgrounds in law, medicine, theater, astrophysics, psychology, political science, and religion have all done very well.”

Gabriella Runnels received her MSA from Georgia Tech in 2017 and now works as a data scientist for Opex Analytics. In her role she works directly with clients to apply machine learning to solve their business problems. She said her experience in the Georgia Tech MSA program was invaluable.

“My time at Georgia Tech prepared me for both the technical and professional aspects of working in data science in the business world,” she said. “The rigorous academic training gave me a deep understanding of core data science topics and robust skills in programming and relevant analytical tools. On the other hand, my extracurricular activities, such as organizing the monthly speaker series, as well as the communication boot camp and the many career events, gave me exposure to the business side of things, which certainly helped prepare me to be a professional data scientist.”

As the manager of marketing analytics at Inspire Brands, Spencer Collins oversees a team that is responsible for the marketing analytics for Arby’s. As a graduate of the MSA program, Collins believes he was well prepared for his role.

“The program taught me everything I needed,” said Collins. “I have continued to see challenges that I either had direct experience with in school or have a process for tackling the issue that I was able to develop and hone in school,” he said. “To make it through the program took a tenacity to work through difficult problems, collaboration to learn from your cohort and match their level of excellence, and a humbleness to know there is always more to learn to keep improving. Those traits transfer regardless of your career. Technically and skill-wise, I came out more prepared than a majority of the degrees and programs my coworkers completed.”

The statistics for graduates are impressive — 97 percent of those who earn their MSA receive job offers within three months of graduation — with an average annual salary of $100,000 a year.

Greg Esper is the vice chair of clinical affairs for the Department of Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. In his role, he oversees Emory’s analytics group. As a member of the MSA Advisory Board, Esper gets to see firsthand the students the program produces.

“My impression is that the program is stellar — one of the best in the country based on the data and the rankings,” he said. “I have worked with students in the program and have referred them to Emory for employment — and everyone's experience with these students has been very positive. They are well trained, knowledgeable, and hard working.”

Job placement for graduates is an important component of the MSA program, and its staff has built relationships with more than 200 companies to aid in the employment process. Other growth has included the creation of the online program, which is expected to have 2,000 students enrolled — representing nearly every U.S. state and more than 100 countries — in January 2019. A combination MSA and MBA option is the newest addition, with nine current students.

When Sokol considers the growth of the program, he thinks of his students — and he can’t wait to see the difference they make in the world.

“We're only in our fifth year, so our first graduates didn't finish until a little more than three years ago,” he said. “ I'm really looking forward to seeing, say, five or 10 years from now, all that our outstanding graduates have accomplished — how far and high they've risen, and how big an impact they've had.”

Chua, who graduates on Saturday with highest honors from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), came to Atlanta from her hometown of Miami specifically to enroll in the Emory University/Georgia Tech dual-degree program, which offers undergraduates the opportunity to earn a bachelor’s degree from Emory College of Arts and Sciences in three years, followed by an engineering degree from Georgia Tech in two years.

Even among ISyE’s many excellent students, Chua is a standout. She entered Georgia Tech with a B.A. in mathematics and economics as a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar from Emory. “I wanted to fuse the merits of both the liberal arts and STEM,” she explained. “It’s an exceptional academic experience, because my STEM education has equipped me to dissect engineering systems via technical analysis, while my liberal arts education has equipped me to frame situations with a flexible, big-picture lens. This joint perspective allows me to tackle problems in an unconventional way.”

An initiated member of the Alpha Pi Mu Honor Society, Chua was drawn to ISyE’s No. 1-ranked program because of a long-held interest in optimizing performance and increasing efficiency. “I have always asked questions about how everyday processes work,” she said. Growing up, when she went to the airport, supermarket, or amusement park, Chua would wonder why the lines were congested and if there was a better way to run operations.

“I chose industrial engineering because it unlocked the answers to my questions and satisfied my natural curiosity. It represented the perfect fit of applying quantitative and qualitative skills in a real-world context. Industrial engineering creates value in virtually any industry – it’s all about repairing and improving upon existing systems. The possibilities are endless, and that is what fuels my excitement about the field.”

The Schwarzman Scholars program, designed to foster relationships between the U.S. and China, aligns seamlessly with Chua’s goals. Next August, when she begins her master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University, she plans to leverage both of her undergraduate degrees to develop a cross-border shipping model between the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies.

“Technology has changed the way we conduct business. I came to realize that e-commerce is the next wave of opportunity for small businesses to enter the global marketplace,” Chua said. “Brick-and-mortar stores are no longer necessary – you create a website, and that’s your borderless storefront for the entire world to access. But in order for small businesses to succeed in the long term, cross-border shipping needs to be more accessible and affordable.

“American and Chinese logistics providers can combine their delivery networks – their routes, facilities, and capital assets. This creates cost synergies, for example. The U.S. and China are uniquely positioned to set the geopolitical stage and create a blueprint model for cross-border shipping, which can then be translated across all trade lanes.”

Chua’s ISyE instructors and advisors see her pioneering vision and leadership potential as well.

“Veronica is very deserving of this award, as she embodies the objectives of the Schwarzman Scholars program. She embraces her role in the global community and wants to take action to shape the world,” said J. Antonio Carbajal, vice president of data science at Turner Broadcasting System and a part-time instructor for ISyE. “Coming from a background of family-run businesses, Veronica is passionate about empowering small businesses by advancing U.S.-China partnerships in the logistics sector.”

“Veronica has high goals for her life. Yet, she is humble, modest, plans carefully, and is unafraid of challenges,” noted ISyE Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Chen Zhou. “When she came to ISyE, she planned out her studies with me with attentiveness to detail and asked well thought-out questions. Before she went to her final interview for the Schwarzman Scholarship, we chatted about both her big plans and short-term goals for the global supply chain between the U.S. and China. I’m highly impressed with her broad knowledge and the insights that she has gained from ISyE’s curriculum, faculty, and students, as well as her internships.”

When asked what she hopes she’ll be able to take away from her Schwarzman experience after it’s over, Chua had a ready answer. “From a professional standpoint, I hope my understanding of the logistics industry is enhanced and that I’m able to investigate central areas of opportunity such that both countries benefit from a strategic partnership.

“From a personal standpoint, I hope I’m able to form lifelong friendships with my fellow scholars, so that together we are able to positively influence and transform how the world functions in the future. Meaningful engagement doesn’t happen unless you connect with others on a human level.”

After completing her year as a Schwarzman Scholar in August 2020, Chua will join the Operations Excellence Program as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company.

In her three-minute speech, Appalwar will remark upon the commonalities that this semester’s graduates have – that everyone is leaving with a degree from the Institute – and on what makes the student experience at Tech so powerful.

“This diploma is going to help us succeed in the world,” Appalwar said, “and we have so much to be proud of.”

The reflection speech is not Appalwar’s first opportunity to consider the meaningfulness of her time at Tech. Earlier this fall, she was a finalist for Ms. Georgia Tech, which involved a panel interview during which she was asked about a moment of regret she had experienced at Tech.

“My first semester here, I was failing out of two classes and was not in a good place personally,” Appalwar recalled. “I was called before the dean of students, and they asked me what they could do to help. It was more empathy and care than I was used to, especially compared to high school, where teachers would yell at the students for not performing well. And after that, I started doing a lot better.

“So in my Ms. Georgia Tech interview, I mentioned this experience, but then I said, truthfully, that I would not change anything about my time here. Sure, my situation wasn’t ideal – and there have been other less-than-ideal experiences as well – but they all got me to this place where I was able to sit in a room full of people and interview for Ms. Georgia Tech. And I’ve also been able to do other things here that are impactful and also make me really happy.”

One of Appalwar’s most memorable experiences has been her participation in the Georgia Tech International Ambassadors (GTIA), a group of students with members from around the world that champions international culture and diversity.

“I’ve been on the executive board of GTIA twice, as well as a general member for a couple of years,” Appalwar noted. “The club is really growing – when I joined, there were about 10 members, and now there are 60. It’s a group of students that values diversity and inclusion and minority rights on campus, and it’s been my safe space for a very long time. Nothing else has brought me so much joy and happiness.”

In addition to these on-campus activities, Appalwar has founded two startups: Thrive, which seeks to improve mental health education for high school and college students in India, and Avana, which provides Indian farmers with an inexpensive water storage solution. After Commencement, she will return to India to further develop these two companies.

“Georgia Tech has definitely prepared me to work on Thrive and Avana through its rigor. Tech teaches us students to push through, even when things get difficult,” Appalwar said. “Because of this, I’m not scared of things being hard or taking a long time to work out, because that’s what the past four years have been like. And the resilience that my Tech experience has given me is a big part of who I am now.”

Harmond, a sixth-year undergraduate in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Francisco, a fifth-year chemical and bimolecular engineering student, are long-time cheerleaders for the Yellow Jackets. After their initial meeting, they didn’t really talk to each other again for two years.

This was actually easier than you might think, because the Tech cheer team is surprisingly large – almost 70 people strong. The team is broken up into three squads by level of skill – Gold, White, and Navy – and divide up cheering at the men’s and women’s basketball games. The entire team is present on football Saturdays.

Eventually, though, Harmond and Francisco were reintroduced by mutual friends the weekend of Francisco’s birthday. They started talking about the books they were reading: Francisco was deep into Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Harmond was rereading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius for the sixth time.

From there, “we would go to a coffee shop or hang out at home and sit and read next to each other,” Harmond said. “And then eventually we would end up talking about what we were reading. It was a different kind of dating than either of us had ever done.”

It didn’t take long before the couple was discussing marriage, but Harmond wanted the actual proposal to be unexpected. Francisco, who had taken a break from cheerleading to focus on her studies, came back to the squad in 2018. That’s when Harmond decided to propose on Senior Day.

“For Senior Day, all our families would be there,” he said. “And because her last name starts with an ‘F’ and mine starts with an ‘H’ – there’s no ‘G’ between us – I knew we would be standing right next to each during the presentation. I could make this work.”

With a little coordination from the Athletic Department and Tech spirit coach Daniel Nester, as well as some help from his dad and from Buzz, Harmond pulled off the surprise. “Dana and I had been on the White squad, but for Senior Day, they put us on the Gold Squad. So we got to do some really fun, higher-level stunts that we had wanted to try for a while. That also put us in front of the student section in Bobby Dodd, and all our friends – who knew the proposal was happening – were in the stands right in front of us.”

After the Senior Day presentation, Buzz knelt down in front of Francisco, giving Harmond a few seconds to drop to one knee behind her and pull out the ring box. “She had written off the proposal even happening, because she thought I would do it before the game,” Harmond said, grinning. “So her reaction was awesome. It was really fun.”

Of course Francisco said yes, and now the couple is planning their wedding for next November, depending – as you would expect from a dedicated cheer couple – on the Yellow Jackets’ football schedule.

They’ve been together a little over a year, but Harmond knew three months in that he wanted to marry Francisco. “I knew she’s the one,” he said. “The one I want to take home to my mom, the one I want to show off to everyone. And now I get to do it forever.”

“With the Medicaid data, we do analysis around population disparities by race and ethnicity and urban versus rural health care and health outcomes. A lot of the research I’ve done is around women’s health, particularly reproductive health,” she explained. “I have a project looking at contraception trends in women with chronic health conditions, and another one that examines how babies are affected when they’re born to teen mothers: Are they more likely to have low birth weight, to be born with addiction issues, to end up in foster care?

“You can work on data everywhere you go – the question is what type of data interests you,” she noted. "Choose a place where you are excited by the questions the data helps you answer. If it has to do with the first year of life, I’m interested in it.”

As a result of Pujol’s extensive research, she was recently awarded a prestigious $40,000 Minority Graduate Scholarship by the Sloan Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. Program, which supports underrepresented minority Ph.D. students in STEM fields. Select colleges and universities, including Georgia Tech, are designated as Sloan University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) and are given funds to distribute to students chosen as Sloan Scholars.

“The Sloan Foundation scholarship is testimony to Toyya's research toward helping vulnerable populations,” Serban, who is Pujol’s advisor, said. “Toyya is very enthusiastic about doing social good with her work.”

In addition to the scholarship money, Pujol will receive mentoring and leadership training through the program. And once she has a faculty position, she will be eligible for additional funding as a result of receiving the minority scholarship. “It really opens a lot of doors,” she said. “You become part of a community that has invested in you.”

Pujol is spending the fall and spring semesters in Boston at Harvard Medical School, where her work is taking on a broader public health focus. She is developing methodologies for applying machine learning to causal inference in difference-in-difference settings. She will apply these methods to private insurance claims data for perinatal spending. The goal is to determine if perinatal spending decreases under an episode-based spending policy.

Pujol plans to graduate in the spring of 2020 and will seek an academic position at that time.

Please visit http://pwp.gatech.edu/hsng2018/ to see video recordings of sessions, pdf presentations and photos from the forum.

To share your research and ideas advancing health systems or to collaborate further with CHHS, connect with us on social media @CHHSGatech or email us CHHS@gatech.edu.

As a result of her internship, Appalwar began thinking about what she really wanted to accomplish – and how. Mental health issues have been a focus of her attention since arriving at Tech – she was on the executive board for the Well-Being Activators and worked to cultivate over 50 activators across campus. She has also worked as a peer coach at the Counseling Center. Consequently, along with Sarayu Kantheti (University of British Columbia) and fellow Georgia Tech student Yash Punjabi (CS 18), she co-founded Thrive, an organization dedicated to raising mental health awareness among high school and college students in India, where Appalwar is from. Thrive won the People’s Choice Award in Georgia Tech’s 2018 Ideas to Serve Competition, and Appalwar received a President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) to further develop Thrive this semester.

Indirectly, mental health issues also led Appalwar and her father to found Avana, a startup that creates affordable farming technologies. She noticed that a lot of the rural farming villages that she visited for her work on Thrive had high suicide rates. Farming can be an extremely challenging occupation in India because rainfall is so erratic, and water storage is a problem. Together with the farmers, the father-and-daughter duo came up with a solution.

“What’s the simplest way to store water?” Appalwar said. “It’s literally digging a pit in the ground.” The farmers suggested the ponds, and the Appalwars – who own a family-run polymer processing plant –devised a wide polymer material to line the ponds, thus enabling farmers to cheaply store water (at a cost of one dollar for 2,700 liters per year).

After she graduates in December, Appalwar plans to return to India to work on both Thrive and Avana. In the following Q&A, she discusses the growth of her two startups and what she’s learned in the process.

You founded Thrive to address mental health issues in India’s high school and college students. What is the mental health landscape like there, and what was your goal for Thrive?

The treatment gap for mental health issues in India is 98 percent, which means that of 100 affected people, only two receive treatment. And obviously, those are extremely severe cases, so people who are moderately affected are not receiving help.

Mental health literacy is a problem. A recent study done on Indian college campuses found that 55 percent of students had moderate to high levels of depression. But when my Thrive co-founders and I talked to students this past summer, we realized that people didn’t even know what depression and anxiety are.

So, through Thrive, we came up with a program to teach students about mental health, and we were able to test out the program in 15 schools – with 700 high school and college students – to see whether it improved their learning outcomes.

What are the next steps for Thrive?

I’m using the PURA stipend to do further research this semester – to get the data together and evaluate what ways the program did and didn’t work, and how we can pivot based on that analysis.

A lot of the schools we worked with were in the slums in Mumbai, so the next step is to pilot an after-school program for one of those schools. Because there are so few counselors in India – one for every 343,000 people – we are instead trying to build up these children’s protective factors, trying to develop their resilience.

We are looking at the whole community as an assets-based model, as opposed to a deficit-based model. These communities are strong, so how can we use that? How can we use the students’ school and their parents and their teachers? A deficit-based perspective would say, “Here’s all the things you don’t have, and here’s how I’m going to give them to you.” Instead we’re thinking about what the students already have and using that to help alleviate their distress.

One thing I learned this past summer is that there’s a “dream gap.” For example, as students here at Tech, we’re in a very privileged position. We know that if we work hard for something, there’s a very good chance we’ll get it. But in India, the attitude I repeatedly encountered was that the students couldn’t even dream, because there is no way they’ll achieve it.

So our responsibility is to teach them that there are resources available to them to help them succeed. For example, there are thousands of scholarships for low-income communities in India, and many of these scholarship funds finish the year with a surplus because not enough people apply for them – people don’t even know about them.

Let’s talk about Avana. What has been the biggest takeaway in starting that organization?

I think the challenge for me was to realize that the people – the farmers – we are working with live incredibly different lives from me. So going into these environments, you don’t want to be patronizing and act like you’re there to solve all their problems.

Avana is a brilliant solution, and the reason that it’s brilliant is because it came from the community. We went in and asked the farmers, “What do you think would be a good way to save water?” And they said, “If we had a big pond on the farms, that would be helpful.”

In order to get to solutions like that, you have to be able to listen. The farmers also told us, “Being able to conserve water is great, and we can grow so much more now. But we want to be able to sell our produce, and sell it at better prices.”

So now we want to connect the farmers directly with the consumer through 100 percent supply chain transparency – people will be able to know exactly where their produce is coming from. The buyers will see these farmers’ faces and feel empathy and know that when they pay a little extra for their food, it’s going to someone who worked really hard to grow it.

What are you most proud of accomplishing?

Both Thrive and Avana are bigger than me or any of my achievements, so it’s hard for me to take credit for them. It’s all about the teams that I work with – absolutely amazing people. But I think I’m most proud of getting outside my comfort zone.

And that has been so rewarding. With Avana, I have never visited a farm and left without baskets of fruit or other produce. The farmers will make you sit down and eat a meal with them. They have such big hearts. For Thrive, distress is not something you can put a number on. So taking an exploratory angle on it – with the research – is something that’s very useful both to our design process, as well as to our growth as people through working on this venture.

The Harold E. Smalley Faculty Endowment Fund was established in memory of Harold E. Smalley, Ph.D. (1921-1994) and is designed to support ISyE faculty appointments within the area of health.

“Chuck’s substantial contributions to ISyE and to his field are reflected in his appointment to the Harold E. Smalley Professorship,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “This appointment will give him the opportunity to further his recent work in developing innovative techniques for medical devices to improve health care delivery.”

Zhang's research interests include additive manufacturing, bio-manufacturing, composites manufacturing, and scalable nanomanufacturing. Most recently, he has initiated new research and education programs in cell-manufacturing and composite structures maintenance.

An example of this is Zhang’s optimization of pre-surgery planning for heart operations using 3D printing and machine-learning techniques. In this project, his team is working with doctors at Piedmont Heart Institute in Atlanta to create patient-specific tissue-mimicking heart valves and machine learning-based predictive models for doctors to use to improve surgery outcomes for the transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure.

In addition, Zhang is developing wireless sensors for monitoring cell manufacturing for cell therapy. In this project, Zhang’s team is working with the CMaT Engineering Research Center to develop advanced wireless sensors that can measure cell density continuously during the cell manufacturing process. These sensors can be used to help monitor and control the cell manufacturing process to ensure the effectiveness of cell therapy.      

“Being named the Harold E. Smalley Professor is especially an honor, given Dr. Smalley’s pioneering work in health care management engineering and its close ties to my work,” said Zhang. “By applying advanced manufacturing technologies – such as 3D printing – to medical devices, we hope to improve and optimize medical care to patients.

“The funding of this professorship will enable me to continue innovating in advanced manufacturing and provide students with new opportunities for learning,” Zhang added.

Zhang received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Iowa, an M.S. in industrial engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and B.S. and M.S. 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 Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering.

His research projects have been sponsored by numerous organizations, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and Society of Manufacturing Engineers, as well as industrial companies such as ATK Launch Systems, Cummins, Delta Airlines, GKN Aerospace Services, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Siemens Power Generation.

The UPS Professorship of Logistics is designed to enhance ISyE’s ability to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars to this position of academic leadership in the field of logistics.

“Alan’s valuable contributions to ISyE, as both a researcher and the associate chair for graduate studies, are reflected in his appointment as the UPS Professor of Logistics,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “The additional resources will allow him to further his research in modern last-mile logistics systems and design and control of large-scale consolidation freight transportation systems.”

Erera’s research focuses on transportation and logistics systems planning and control, with an emphasis on planning under uncertainty and real-time operational control. His recent work has addressed dynamic vehicle routing systems for same-day distribution; resilient logistics network design for food supply chains; service network design, linehaul equipment management, and driver scheduling for consolidation freight carriers; robust container fleet management for global shipping companies; and robust and flexible vehicle routing system planning and control for distribution companies.

Most recently, Erera has concentrated on building understanding of modern last-mile logistics systems that deliver products directly to consumers within a few hours of order placement. He is also studying courier management for meal delivery, developing fast courier dispatch technologies useful for the practical dynamic optimization problem of assigning meal orders to couriers every few minutes.

Erera also has a recently renewed interest in modern systems for personal mobility. He is examining ideas for new forms of urban transportation systems that combine aspects of traditional scheduled public transit with on-demand services such as those provided by ride-hailing transportation network companies. He plans to focus on design questions for such systems, which he noted are sometimes ignored by the operations research community. Design questions include determining fleet sizes and vehicle mix decisions, determining the right mix between fixed schedule and dynamic services, and how to implement dynamic services that provide flexibility while remaining operationally simple.

“I am very honored to be selected to serve as the UPS Professor of Logistics,” said Erera. “I have focused my research career on developing methods for the design and control of logistics systems, with a particular emphasis on planning flexible systems that adapt well to operational uncertainties. My current work focuses more and more often on real-time planning, leveraging available data to automatically update decisions during operations, and I’ve used these ideas to optimize large-scale meal delivery systems and passenger vehicle ride-sharing systems.  

“Going forward, I intend to continue studying modern high-velocity last-mile logistics systems that support rapid delivery of products directly to consumers, and support from the UPS professorship will help me investigate fundamental problems in this domain,” Erera added.

Erera has written over 50 research papers in his field and has delivered over 100 technical presentations and invited lectures. His research program has been supported by federal agencies (DHS, USDOT, NSF) and major U.S. freight carriers and manufacturing firms. In addition, he will serve as president of the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society beginning in 2019.

He received his B.S. Eng. In civil engineering from Princeton University in 1993, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and 2000, respectively.

The GTMI team includes Ben Wang, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair in Manufacturing Systems and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and executive director of GTMI; Chuck Zhang, Harold E. Smalley Professor in ISyE; and GTMI Research Engineer II Kan Wang. Their collaboration on “3D Printed Patient-Specific Tissue-Mimicking Phantoms for Surgery Planning” won them the honor.

“Congratulations to Chuck, Ben, and the team on winning this prestigious award,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “Their ground-breaking research in the areas of advanced materials design and multi-material 3D printing will help surgeons better serve their patients. This recognition is very well-deserved.”

This innovative technology integrates the latest developments in advanced materials design and multi-material 3D printing to create patient-specific, soft tissue-like medical phantoms/models that can imitate mechanical behaviors of human tissue/organs. These models can be used for planning of surgeries such as the Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) procedure in cardiologic treatment and intervention.

According to Wang, “Patient-specific tissue-mimicking phantoms have a wide range of biomedical applications including validation of computational models and imaging techniques, medical device testing, surgery planning, and medical education and training.”

Although 3D printing technologies have demonstrated promise in fabricating patient-specific phantoms, the current process of 3D printing phantoms is only able to generate a geometrically accurate specimen. This cannot be used for applications where biomechanical accuracy is needed such as pre-surgery testing of implanted medical devices. To answer this challenge, the GTMI and Piedmont Heart Center researchers developed an innovative materials design and manufacturing technology that allows 3D printed phantoms to mimic mechanical strain stiffening behaviors of soft tissues. The process uses multi-material 3D printed meta-materials with micro-structured reinforcement printed in a soft polymeric matrix. The efficacy of this method has been demonstrated in optimum heart valve surgery planning for the Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) procedure.

Zhang said, “With evolving additive manufacturing technologies, it will be possible to fabricate ‘plastic tissues’ with both accurate anatomical and biomechanical properties unique to each patient’s biomechanical and pathological characteristics.”

“This process provides high value for advanced medical device development and surgery planning,” added Kan Wang. Due to the innovative nature of the research work and product, a U.S. patent is pending, and the team also received a 2018 TechConnect Innovation Award.

R&D 100 Awards recipients include established Fortune 500 companies and federally funded research institutions, as well as academic and government labs. Award winners were selected by an independent panel of more than 50 judges representing R&D leaders in a variety of fields. Winners were recognized across five major categories — Analytical/Test, IT/Electrical, Mechanical/Materials, Process/Prototyping, and Software/Services and Other. The full list of winners can be found at www.rd100conference.com.

GTMI brings together industry leaders, government partners and top researchers to collaborate and find solutions for the greatest challenges facing U.S. industry today: creating quality jobs, ensuring global competitiveness, and advancing economic and environmental sustainability. For more information, please go to www.manufacturing.gatech.edu.

ISyE alumnus A. Russell Chandler III (BIE 67) established the endowment fund in order to enhance the ability of ISyE to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.

“Alexander has made substantial contributions to ISyE and to the fields of optimization and large scale, multi-stage stochastic programming,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “His appointment to the A. Russell Chandler III professorship will give him the ability to enhance his research and many collaborations in these areas and further disseminate his findings, which have many applications, including unit commitment problems, inventory scheduling, and finance.”

Shapiro's research interests are focused on stochastic programming, risk analysis, simulation based optimization, nondifferentiable optimization and nonsmooth analysis, sensitivity analysis and optimization of queueing networks, sensitivity analysis of nonlinear programs, and multivariate statistical analysis.

Shapiro also has projects with other ISyE and Georgia Tech faculty. Together with Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie and Ph.D. student Rui Zhang, he is working on a matrix completion problem of recovering low rank matrix from an incomplete set of observations. This research has many applications in signal processing and machine learning. And with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Professor Glaucio Paulin and Paulin’s Ph.D. student Xiaojia Shelly Zhang, he is developing algorithms for topology optimization subject to many load cases.

Shapiro has been on the editorial board of several professional journals, such as Mathematics of Operations Research, ESAIM: Control, Optimization and Calculus of Variations, and Computational Management Science. He was an area editor (optimization) of Operations Research and editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming, Series A (2012-17), the flagship journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society.

He has given numerous invited keynote and plenary talks, including a 2010 invited section talk (Control Theory & Optimization) at the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Hyderabad, India. In 2013, he was awarded the INFORMS Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in optimization. He received the 2018 Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Shapiro earned an M.Sc. in mathematics from Moscow University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics-statistics from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1981.

Winners

Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed received the 2018 Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society. The society cited Ahmed’s “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of stochastic discrete optimization.” The Farkas Prize was established in 2006 and is awarded at the INFORMS annual meeting to a mid-career researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of optimization over the course of their career.

George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Turgay Ayer, in joint work with researchers from University of Texas at Dallas, won the eBusiness Section Best Paper Award for “When IT Creates Legal Vulnerability: Not Just Overutilization but Underprovisioning of Health Care  Could Be a Consequence.”

The paper deals with the increased litigation risk that may be associated with defensive medicine, a physician behavior characterized by providing more care than necessary due to fear of litigation. In a medical litigation case, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are considered as inculpatory or exculpatory evidence, but the formulation of CPGs with respect to precision of CPGs is still in question. In this paper, the authors examine the effects of defensive medicine on care delivery under expanded information sharing, and identify screening guidelines that maximize the social welfare.

Ph.D. student Beste Basciftci received the INFORMS ENRE Best Student Paper Award for “Stochastic Optimization of Maintenance and Operations Schedules under Unexpected Failures,” co-authored with Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed, Georgia Power Early Career Professor and Professor Nagi Gebraeel, and Murat Yildirim (Ph.D. 16).

The paper develops a novel stochastic optimization framework for jointly optimizing maintenance and operations schedules of a fleet of generators with explicit consideration of sensor-driven unexpected failure scenarios by leveraging data analytics. The authors’ extensive results on illustrative instances highlight significant cost savings and reductions in generator failures compared to existing scheduling approaches, in addition to computational benefits of their solution methodology with algorithmic enhancements and parallel implementation.

Fouts Family Professor Natashia Boland, Mike Hewitt (Ph.D. 09), Luke Marshall (Ph.D. 17), and James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh received the Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Section Best Paper Award for “The Continuous-time Service Network Design Problem.”

The paper deals with the use of time discretization in service network design models, specifically answering the question, “Is it possible to produce an optimal continuous-time solution without explicitly modeling each point in time?” The team’s work developed an iterative refinement algorithm using partially time-expanded networks that solves continuous-time service network design problems.

Ph.D. student Mostafa Reisi won the Data Mining Best Paper Award for “Multiple Tensor-on-Tensor Regression: An Approach for Modeling Processes with Heterogeneous Sources of Data,” co-authored with Hao Yan (Ph.D. 16), Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Kamran Paynabar, and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi.

The authors developed a general multiple tensor-on-tensor regression framework (called MTOT) that employs tensor algebra to effectively integrate heterogeneous inputs to predict a high-dimensional output. The MTOT consolidates and generalizes the function-on-scalar, scalar-on-function, and function-on-function regression frameworks and allows for any form of structured data to be included in the modeling process. The key advantage of the MTOT is that it learns several basis matrices, in accordance to the relationship between the inputs and the output, to capture the correlation structure of the HD data and to perform dimensionality reduction.

Assistant Professor He Wang received first place in the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) paper competition for the work “A Re-solving Heuristic with Uniformly Bounded Loss for Network Revenue Management,” coauthored with Ph.D. student Pornpawee Bumpensanti.

Wang and Bumpensanti’s paper studies how a firm can maximize its revenue given limited resources and time. This is known as the "network revenue management" problem and has a wide range of applications in the airline, hotel, and retail industries. The paper proposes a new algorithm for this problem and proves that the algorithm achieves the best possible theoretical performance (i.e., a constant loss).

Third Place

Weijun Xie (Ph.D. 17) was awarded third place in the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Best Paper competition for “On Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained Program with Wasserstein Distance.”

Honorable Mention

Assistant Professor Swati Gupta, Song Zhou (Cornell University), and Madeleine Udell (Cornell University) received an honorable mention in the Undergraduate Operations Research Prize for their joint work, “Limited Memory Kelley’s Method Converges for Composite Convex and Submodular Objectives.”

George Family Foundation Early Career Professor and Associate Professor Turgay Ayer, Ph.D. student Zhaowei She, and Daniel Montanera (Georgia State University) received an honorable mention for the Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Award for “Pay for Performance or Pay for Selection? An Analysis of the Capitation Payment Models in Health Care.”

Finalists

Ph.D. student Pornpawee Bumpensanti was a finalist in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM) Student Paper Competition for the work “A Re-solving Heuristic with Uniformly Bounded Loss for Network Revenue Management,” coauthored with Assistant Professor He Wang.

Ph.D. student Juan Du, Xiaowei Yue (Ph.D. 18), Jeffrey H. Hunt (Boeing), and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi were finalists for the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Refereed Paper Award for “Optimal Placement of Actuators for Composite Fuselage Shape Control."

Ph.D. student Shuang Li was a finalist in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Student Paper Competition for the work “Scan B-Statistic for Kernel Change-point Detection.” Li also was a finalist in the Social Media Analytics Student Paper Competition for “Detecting Changes in Dynamic Events over Networks." Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie is a co-author for both papers.

Ph.D. student Ruizhi Zhang was a finalist in the Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Section Best Student Paper Competition for the work “Scalable Robust Monitoring of Large-scale Data Streams,” co-authored with Associate Professor Yajun Mei and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor Jan Shi.

A. Russell Chandler III, who graduated from ISyE in 1967, endowed the faculty fund to enhance the ability of ISyE to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.

“Xiaoming has made valuable contributions to ISyE and to the fields of data science and statistics, especially in developing inferential methods that are both statistically and computationally efficient,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “His appointment to the A. Russell Chandler III Professorship will allow him to further his research in these areas and continue to develop future data scientists.”

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 theory and methodologies in a range of problems.

“This new professorship is a big encouragement toward my academic work, which is at the interface of statistics, computing, and optimization,” Huo said. “I plan to use most of these new resources to support early stage graduate students who may not have extensive research experience.”

Huo is the director of Georgia Tech’s Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science (TRIAD), which integrates research and education in mathematical, statistical, and algorithmic foundations for data science. In conjunction with Huo’s work on data science, he has received a $1.5 million TRIPODS grant from the National Science Foundation to support the development of the foundations of data science at Georgia Tech.

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

He is an active member within the Center for Statistical Science, helping to shape its mission via numerous strategic initiatives within Georgia Tech. He is also an associate director of the Master of Science in Analytics. In addition, Huo is helping to establish a new Georgia Tech campus in Shenzhen, a booming city considered to be China’s Silicon Valley.

Huo’s papers have appeared in top journals, and some of them are highly cited. His work led to an interview by Emerging Research Fronts in June 2006 in the field of mathematics (one paper from the entire field of mathematics is selected every other month). He is a senior member of IEEE and a Fellow of ASA and IPAM. In 2005, he won the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty award. When Huo was a high school student, he represented China in the 30th International Mathematical Olympiad, which was held in Braunschweig, Germany in 1989, and won a golden prize.

Endowed by ISyE alumnus J. Louis Fouts (BIE 90), the Fouts Family Faculty Fund is designed to enhance the ability of ISyE to attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.

“Natashia has made significant contributions to ISyE and to the fields of integer linear programming and discrete optimization and their applications to address complex problems in government and industry,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “Her appointment to the Fouts Family Professorship is well-deserved, and through it, Natashia will be able to explore a new research direction – using optimization and operations research tools to improve human happiness.”

Boland’s contributions to her field have spanned theory, algorithms, modeling, and applications in mining, defense, renewable energy, airline planning, freight transport, port logistics, and water management.

She aided in the initial design of integer linear programming decision support tools for open-pit mine production scheduling and explored approaches that better incorporated blending of mineral products and uncertainty in the mine geology. She then went on to tackle supply chain logistics problems in coal export, developing decision support tools for integrated planning of maintenance in the rail/port stockyard system and for both strategic and tactical planning of the movement of material through the system.

More recently, Boland has turned her attention to projects that, in her words, “optimize happiness.”

“My goal is to seed a new direction for the field of optimization, and more broadly, for operations research (OR),” she said. “The Fouts Family Professorship will aid in the development of this aim. OR has historically addressed questions of efficiency and sought to optimize objectives such as maximizing profit or minimizing costs. More recently, OR for social good has emerged, leading to such objectives as minimizing environmental impact and maximizing social welfare.

“Although human happiness is impacted by all of these factors, to date, no major OR theme has emerged that seeks to directly optimize human happiness. Yet there are strong indications that such a direction is needed, and is timely,” Boland explained. “In many countries, including the U.S., depression and addiction are reaching epidemic proportions. Aging populations and their mental health also present increasing challenges to our society. To date, very little optimization or OR research has been included in these initiatives, which represent a great untapped potential for the field.”

Through the Fouts Family Professorship, Boland plans to develop relationships with leading psychology and behavioral science researchers and interested OR researchers, particularly including other ISyE faculty members.

Prior to joining ISyE, Boland held the position of professor of applied mathematics at the University of Newcastle, Australia from 2008 to 2014. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Western Australia in 1992, she spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Canada’s University of Waterloo and Georgia Tech. She also spent 13 years with the University of Melbourne.

Boland’s research has been supported by UPS, NSF, ARC (Australian Research Council), the HVCCC (Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator) and BHP-Billiton.

Libby was the first woman to use mathematical models for supply chain analysis at the Coca-Cola Company. Often, she was the only woman among male colleagues working on global problems. By standing up to defend her work vigorously and completing projects with assiduous diligence, she proved herself equal to the best of the men around her.

Read a Q&A with Peck in which she talks about her roles at Coca-Cola, how her ISyE degree prepared her for her work there, and her memories of being a student at Georgia Tech: https://b.gatech.edu/2RaZaiT.

His current work focuses on artificial intelligence, data science, and operations research with the goal of developing methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy.

In fact, Atlanta’s well-known traffic issues present a particularly intriguing puzzle for Van Hentenryck, who has a project with MARTA already in place. One aspect of the project involves working to determine how autonomous vehicles, such as rail line “pods,” can be used to more efficiently deliver people to where they’re trying to go. Such pods would be smaller than today’s current train cars, but they would depart and arrive on a more frequent schedule.

“Transportation will likely undergo substantial changes in the next decade,” said Van Hentenryck. “Finding how to design effective, equitable, and sustainable mobility systems is one of the fundamental challenges faced by society. The convergence of a number of technological enablers, including machine learning and optimization, provide truly exciting opportunities.”

Van Hentenryck’s research on energy systems and resilience involves looking at how renewable energies such as solar and wind impact the availability of electricity across large power grids. These energy sources are very unpredictable compared to traditional sources and lead to increased volatility in the system. He is working to solve this complex problem and shape the future grid.  

He is also working with the French transmission system, RTE France, on a project called Grid Research for Good. The goal is to generate test cases that capture the complexity of actual electrical networks. The test cases will be based on RTE’s transmission system, which spans over 100,000 km and operates at three different voltage levels.

“Energy research is another fundamental societal challenge where new advances in optimization and machine learning are strongly needed in order to deal with the additional stochasticity introduced by renewable energy, the scale of these systems, and the underlying physics,” he noted.

In addition, Van Hentenryck brings with him to Georgia Tech the Seth Bonder Summer Camp in Computational and Data Science, which is funded through a gift from the Seth Bonder Foundation and will be administered by CEISMC and overseen by Van Hentenryck and his students.

This camp aims to attract rural and lower-income high school students in Georgia who have had limited or no exposure to data science and computer programming. Throughout the course of the week, students will gain facility with computer programming, machine learning, optimization, computational social science, and genomics.

“I always believed – and we now have shown – that high school students can learn and be excited by computer science and engineering,” Van Hentenryck said. “Every year, I look forward to the Seth Bonder camp and to getting rejuvenated by teaching the next generation of students.”

Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and of INFORMS. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from both the University of Louvain and the University of Nantes, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the Philip J. Bray Award for teaching excellence in the physical sciences at Brown University, the ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, the ICS INFORMS Prize for Research Excellence at the Intersection of Computer Science and Operations Research, and an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He received a Test of Time Award from the Association of Logic Programming and numerous best paper awards, including at IJCAI and AAAI.

“Ron has had an incredible career in which he has demonstrated tremendous leadership abilities,” said Edwin Romeijn, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair at ISyE. “The Joseph Mayo Pettit Distinguished Service Award is the highest honor presented by the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. Ron is an outstanding member of our community, and we are proud to have him as part of the ISyE family.”

Johnson said, “I am deeply honored and humbled to receive this undeserved recognition from Georgia Tech. I am proud to be an alumnus of this great institution and even more proud to say that I work here. I accept this award on behalf of every student, staff member, faculty member, and colleague here at Tech who may have allowed this light to shine in my direction — it was not my effort; it was all of ours.”

Before he joined the ISyE faculty, Johnson was the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) first senior vice president for referee operations from July 2008 - July 2012.

Prior to the NBA, Johnson served as the deputy commanding general and deputy chief of engineers, the second highest-ranking senior engineer staff officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He retired as a major general in April 2008 after 32 years of military service.

Johnson’s awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit (with four Oak Leaf Clusters), and the Combat Action Badge.

He is also the recipient of the 2018 Atlanta Business League Men of Influence Award, the 2017 Trailblazer Award from the Georgia Tech Black Alumni Organization, the 2003 Black Engineer of the Year Award for Professional Achievement in Government Service, an inductee into the 2005 Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech, and the recipient of the 2008 Black Engineer Lifetime Achievement Award. He was recently chosen to receive the 2019 Black Engineer of the Year Educational Leadership Award.

Johnson is the former secretary and board member of Goodwill Industries, International. He is a National Trustee of the Boys and Girls Club of America, serves on the National Workforce Solutions Advisory Board, and is a former trustee for both the Georgia Tech Foundation and Georgia Tech Alumni Association.

He has also given back in the form of two scholarships endowed in his name at Georgia Tech, and has a room named for him in Tech’s Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.

“Congratulations to Shabbir on this major recognition of his work,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “This prestigious award is presented annually to a mid-career researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of optimization over the course of their career. Shabbir’s research in developing methods for large-scale optimization problems, and their applications in energy and other networked systems, has made a significant impact in his field. This honor is very well deserved.”

“I am deeply honored and humbled to be selected for the 2018 Farkas Prize,” said Ahmed. “Sincere thanks to the esteemed prize committee for choosing me. Throughout my research career, I have been very fortunate to work with many excellent collaborators and Ph.D. students, and this award is a great recognition of our joint research accomplishments.”

Ahmed’s theoretical contributions to stochastic programming have been broad and deep. These have improved the understanding of multistage stochastic programming and consistent formulations of risk preferences, and provided bounds on sample average approximation solutions to non-convex chance-constrained optimization problems. His contributions to mathematical programming computation address some of the most difficult but important topics in the field with wide applicability in production systems, energy systems, health care, transportation, security, and more. His ability to exploit integer-programming structures that arise in stochastic programming is a recurring theme in his research.

Of particular importance is: (i) Ahmed’s work that allows combining of single-scenario mixed-integer programming inequalities in a multi-stage stochastic program; (ii) his research on using integer programming, with knapsack inequalities, to solve a class of probabilistically constrained linear programs; and, (iii) his recent work on extending decomposition algorithms for solving large-scale multi-stage stochastic integer programs.

About Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed

Ahmed received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 2000, and his dissertation on stochastic integer programming won the Dantzig Prize from INFORMS. Since then, he has become a recognized worldwide leader in the integration of two challenging methodologies – stochastic programming and integer programming – essential for solving important optimization problems in energy, supply chain, transportation, and finance.

Ahmed’s research 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.

He has served as the chair of the Stochastic Programming Society (2007-10), and as a vice-chair (Stochastic Programming) of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2006-08). His honors include the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, the National Science Foundation CAREER award, two IBM Faculty Awards, and the Coca-Cola Early Career Professorship from ISyE. Ahmed is an associate editor for Mathematical Programming A, Mathematical Programming C, Operations Research, and Operations Research Letters. He is a senior member of IEEE and a Fellow of INFORMS.

“Congratulations to Pinar on this exciting leadership opportunity,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “By serving in this very important role in the largest professional association for operations research, management science, and analytics professionals, she will continue to position both herself and ISyE as leaders in our field and assist in the advancement of our profession.”

Keskinocak, the ADVANCE Professor in Tech’s College of Engineering and the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, is also an INFORMS Fellow. Keskinocak said, “As an active INFORMS member since 1996, I have enthusiastically served our community in a variety of roles. I am grateful for this opportunity to continue my service in collaboration with INFORMS members and constituents to expand the reach and impact of our community.

“One of my priority areas is to further amplify the impact and reach of our community, for example, by focusing on broadening our membership base, establishing links with various application areas, building/strengthening the bridges between academia and industry, and broadly disseminating the work of our members highlighting their contributions.”

“The future of our field will be shaped by the new generation,” she added. “Thus, it is important to promote diversity and inclusion in our community.”

Keskinocak has held many previous roles within INFORMS. She served as both secretary and the vice president of membership and professional recognition on the INFORMS Board. She co-founded and served as president of the Public Sector Operations Research Section and the Junior Faculty Interaction Group Forum, as well as the president of the Health Applications Society and the Women in OR/MS Forum.

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly in health and humanitarian systems, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation.

• Benefit from high-caliber curricula and coaching from national leaders.
• Collaborate with other cutting-edge thinkers to create greater impact.
• Accelerate their ability to build healthy communities, inform public opinion and policy, and contribute significantly to building a Culture of Health.

RWJF's leadership programs are designed to equip leaders across the country—in every sector and field—to collaborate, break down silos, and use their influence to make communities healthier and more equitable. To learn more about Interdisciplinary Research Leaders and RWJF’s other leadership development programs, as well as to learn about other participants, visit the program website.

Mr. Orr has over 25 years of experience working in global operations for industrial and consumer products companies. He joined Genuine Parts Company (GPC) in 2005, serving as SVP of Operations & Logistics for S.P. Richards Company (a GPC subsidiary). In 2009, he was promoted to SVP of Operations and Logistics for GPC.

Prior to Genuine Parts Company, Mr. Orr served as Executive Vice President of Operations of O'Sullivan Industries Holdings Inc. From 2002 to 2004, he was Group Vice President, Operations for Newell Rubbermaid where he had global operational responsibility including manufacturing, safety, supply chain and logistics. Prior to Newell Rubbermaid, he worked for Allied-Signal (Honeywell), in a variety of engineering and operation assignments.

“For years, Georgia Tech has been honored to work together with the Ports Authority, Governor Nathan Deal’s office, and business and government throughout the state in logistics, transportation, manufacturing, and education to strengthen our State economy and create jobs,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “We are pleased to further solidify this partnership to benefit Georgia’s transportation and logistics industry.”

The goal of the MOU is to bring advanced research, evolving global logistics trends, and analysis from the world to Savannah. By tapping into the hands-on expertise at GPA and the Center of Innovation for Logistics — as well as the high-tech analysis and research at Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain and Logistics Institute — cargo owners and third-party logistics providers will gain superior insight into everything from when and where to build infrastructure to improved efficiency in cargo routing.

“Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain & Logistics Institute has established logistics improvement partnerships in global trade hubs such as Rotterdam, Singapore, Shenzhen, and Panama,” said GPA Board Chairman Jimmy Allgood.   “I am delighted to announce that for their first such agreement with a port authority in the Western Hemisphere, they have chosen an organization that is in their own state of Georgia.”

Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering has been ranked No. 1 in the country for the past 28 years, and Georgia Tech is recognized as one of the leading research universities in the world.

Matt Markham, director of the Georgia Center of Innovation for Logistics, said the collaborative effort further strengthens the state’s position as an economic development leader.

“Most companies that choose Georgia as their home depend on its world-class logistics for their success,” Markham said. “Our new relationship builds on our center’s goal of providing company-specific analyses and facilitating connections between logistics providers and potential clients.”

The multi-modal network is designed to combine ocean, truck, rail, and air transportation to create optimal conditions for an easier and faster network. GPA Executive Director Griff Lynch said the initiative will allow the Georgia Ports Authority to continue growing its service area across the U.S. Southeast and beyond.

“We are excited to enter into this agreement between our organizations,” Lynch said. “The MOU leverages the Institute’s predictive analytics and supply chain optimization, the Center of Innovation for Logistics’ network of connections, and the GPA’s experience in the field as an industry leader.”

ABOUT THE GEORIA PORTS AUTHORITY:

Since 1945, Georgia’s ports have served as magnets for international trade and investment, enriching the state’s economy to benefit all Georgians. The Georgia Ports Authority is dedicated to providing customers with the most efficient, productive port facilities in the nation, and to creating jobs and business opportunities to benefit more than 9.7 million Georgians. The GPA is committed to maintaining its competitive edge through development of leading-edge technology, marketing and operations to move cargo faster. And, the Authority is working hard to identify what must be done today to sustain growth, performance and security for tomorrow.

ABOUT THE GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY:

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is one of the nation’s leading research universities — a university that embraces change while continually creating the next. The next generation of leaders. The next breakthrough startup company. The next life-saving medical treatment. Georgia Tech provides a focused, technologically based education to more than 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Georgia Tech has many nationally recognized programs, all top-ranked by peers and publications alike, and is ranked in the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News and World Report. It offers degrees through the Colleges of Computing, Design, Engineering, Sciences, the Scheller College of Business, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech has more than 100 centers focused on interdisciplinary research that consistently contribute vital research and innovation to American government, industry, and business.

ABOUT THE CENTER OF INNOVATION FOR LOGISTICS:

The Center of Innovation for Logistics facilitates innovative logistics solutions that leverage Georgia’s superior business climate and enhance cargo-owing companies’ competitiveness. Exclusive to Georgia, the Center collaborates with companies that currently ship to or from Georgia, as well as those looking to locate in Georgia to deploy the world’s best multi-modal logistics for supply chain success. With targeted efforts to engage its unique position in state government with partnerships in the logistics industry, the Center provides impactful forums for companies to network, address industry issues, and share knowledge.

The rapid growth of data seems wild and limitless. But various Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) institutes have been making theoretical sense of it.

TRIPODS institutes receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Among them is Georgia Tech’s TRIAD – the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science, which is directed by Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Xiaoming Huo. TRIAD researchers are poised to share data science insights with the Atlanta higher education community.

Meanwhile, NSF aims to expand the scope of TRIPODS institutes. Today the agency awarded 19 collaborative projects at 23 universities. The awards are called TRIPODS+X grants. X is the scope-expanding activity; it could be research, visioning, or education.

Among the award recipients is Georgia Tech’s project: TRIPODS+X:EDU Collaborative Education: Data-driven Discovery and Alliance, led by Prasad Tetali, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Georgia Tech.

The award to Georgia Tech and its alliance partners – Agnes Scott, Morehouse, and Spellman Colleges – aims to train a diverse workforce for the inevitable data-driven future. The project will also engage faculty at the minority-serving institutions to help them teach data science and develop related curricula.

"TRIPODS+X is exciting not only for its near-term impact addressing some of society's most important scientific challenges, but [also] because of its potential for developing tools for future applications," says Anne Kinney, NSF assistant director Mathematical and Physical Sciences. 

With the $200,000 TRIPODS+X:EDU grant, the alliance partners will develop undergraduate data-science-focused courses. Through boot camps, workshops, and other joint activities, they will prepare data science modules to integrate into science curricula at the partner institutions. The goal is to prepare students who can address the emerging challenges in data science.

“The NSF-supported educational alliance is exciting in many ways,” says Prasad Tetali.

“It gives an opportunity to infuse the foundational data science curriculum with real-world applications from the physical and life sciences,” Tetali says. “It will also likely catalyze collaborative research in data science and related fields between Georgia Tech and Atlanta area colleges.”  

Following are the individuals involved in the TRIPODS+X: EDU project:

Principal Investigators

• Chris DePree, Agnes Scott College
• Alan Koch, Agnes Scott College
• Wenjing Liao, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics
• Brandeis Marshall, Spelman College       
• Chuang Peng, Morehouse College
• David Sherrill, Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Prasad Tetali, Georgia Tech School of Mathematics and School of Computer Science
• Joshua Weitz, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences

Senior Personnel

• Thinh Doan, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Flavio Fenton, Georgia Tech School of Physics
• Xiaoming Huo, Georgia Tech Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Renata Rawlings-Goss, Georgia Tech Institute for Data Engineering and Science
• Justin Romberg, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Photo Caption

From left to right, top row: Joshua Weitz, Justin Romberg, and David Sherrill; middle row: Alan Koch, Brandeis Marshall, Chris DePree, and Wenjing Liao; bottom row: Thinh Doan, Prasad Tetali, and Chuang Peng

“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 24 consecutive years thanks to the hard work and collective efforts of our world-class faculty, outstanding students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni.”

For the first time, all 10 of Georgia Tech’s engineering programs that are ranked by USNWR are in the top five. For the sixth time, the overall College of Engineering ranks as fourth on the USNWR chart, again tying the College with the California Institute of Technology's engineering program. Among public universities, Georgia Tech's engineering program ranks second behind the University of California, Berkeley.

USNWR Undergraduate Rankings

#4 Engineering (no change and still tied with the California Institute of Technology)

Engineering Programs

#1 Industrial/Manufacturing

#2 Aerospace

#2 Chemical (up from #3)

#2 Civil

#2 Mechanical (up from #3)

#3 Biomedical (down from #1)

#3 Materials (up from #5)

#4 Electrical

#4 Environmental (down from #2)

#5 Computer (up from #6)

While visiting Virginia in December 2015, the Summerville, SC teenager decided to try snowboarding. Her mom, Christine, videotaped the inaugural run. To her horror, she watched as Emily missed a turn and crashed, hitting her head on an exposed metal pole.

Thankfully, Emily survived. But recovery – which began with learning how to walk and talk again – was long and arduous. It required months of rehabilitation at Shepherd Pathways in Atlanta.

Shepherd Pathways specializes in helping people overcome traumatic brain injuries, severe spinal cord injuries, and other serious medical conditions. It is complex work. For each patient, Pathways must provide the right mix of physical, speech, occupational, and other kinds of therapies.

Here’s something else that is incredibly complex: scheduling these therapies.

At any given time, Shepherd Pathways has dozens of patients with varying injuries, requiring an assortment of skilled staff, in sessions spread out over different periods of time. Their way of orchestrating it all is to hold weekly assemblies of up to 25 therapists, gathering them in a room with clip-boarded sheets and pencils — a scene that, when described, evokes the old trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

“Every week, they come into this big room and create a whole schedule on paper,” said Meena Iyer, senior process improvement advisor for Shepherd. “It is a major time commitment.”

They knew there had to be a better way. And to find it, Shepherd turned to Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

Once a year, Keskinocak teaches a graduate-level course in which student teams apply their industrial engineering, operations research, and data analytics skills to solve real-world problems in health care, humanitarian systems, and other public sector or societal applications. During spring 2017, one of the project teams focused on streamlining and automating the scheduling process at Pathways.

“Pinar was actually one of my professors,” said Kristin Goin (MSHS 08), Shepherd’s former senior improvement consultant who teamed up with Pathways colleague Iyer on the project. “I knew that optimization and scheduling was a key skill set that industrial engineers had.”

“One of the first steps was to answer the question, ‘What is ideal care?’” Keskinocak recalled. “The Pathways schedule was somewhat provider-centric. As we started working, we asked them how they would provide an ideal care to patients if they had a magic wand. This question was helpful in thinking about each patient’s unique needs.”

Defining the problem also meant examining the current state of scheduling in detail. “We created a map of every aspect of the manual scheduling process,” Goin said. “We put that across an entire wall of a room, like a war room, and went over every step.” They also surveyed Pathways staff to identify pain points and inefficiencies.

Under the guidance of Goin, Iyer, Keskinocak, and the Pathways staff, the six-member student team first streamlined how Pathways collected information on both the needs of the patients and the availability of the staff. They created two tools to do this, each to ensure that complete and consistent sets of data were available.

“After that, we developed heuristic algorithms,” explained Kirthana Hampapur, who was a master’s student in ISyE at the time, and a member of the student team. “The heuristic would go through the two tools – the patient info, which we called an Ideal Plan of Care tool, and the staff availability data – then assign each patient to therapists across multiple time slots.”

The students could have declared victory, as patient scheduling was now much closer to automation. But Hampapur remembered, “We felt like we hadn’t left the project in a good place.” The process was still not optimized to provide patients with as many therapy appointments as possible.

So after consulting with Keskinocak, she started a summer internship with Shepherd Pathways to continue the work. Using Python, the high-level programming language employed in application development, Hampapur continued to develop and implement the heuristic. Then in the fall semester, as she began pursuing her Ph.D., she teamed up with another student, Idil Arsik, also a Ph.D. student in ISyE, to develop a model of mixed integer-programming to improve the solution.

The result was something Shepherd nicknamed “The Wizard.”

“This was the actual software that took into account all of the input on patient needs, all of the staff availability, and then several other rules, such as when a certain patient has to go with a certain staff member,” Goin said. “The Wizard then generated the schedule.”

“Given the specified objectives and constraints, it creates the best schedule possible,” Hampapur said, “because every patient gets what he or she needs, and the number of therapy appointments is maximized.”

The outcome was happy for Shepherd Pathways. The time required for scheduling was reduced by 60 percent, and more than 90 percent of scheduling requirements were met.

“With 150 patients who have different needs, there are millions of possible schedule combinations,” Goin said. “The number of constraints is phenomenal, so it’s like peeling an onion. Georgia Tech has never failed to deliver the onion as peeled.”

Her research focuses on improving K-12 engineering education through research on curriculum and test development, and the development of students’ computational thinking in technology-enhanced environments. As part of her graduate studies, Ketenci directed a study that focused on measuring engineering curriculum impact on students’ computational thinking and 21st-century skills. She also works with a research group for online undergraduate education, and her role involves social network analysis and emotion analysis to measure changing leadership patterns among students’ online discussion posts and to analyze the relationship between students’ emotion in their discussion posts and their leadership level.

This is a new position for ISyE. What do you hope to accomplish in this role?

The most important thing is to continue bringing a diverse cohort of terrific students into ISyE. I really like doing recruiting, connecting with students, and talking about all of the great master’s programs we have here.

We’d also like to transition ISyE’s top undergrads into our graduate programs, and moreover, to recruit the strongest students from neighboring schools such as Emory University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College. In addition, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera has encouraged me to tweak and evolve our offerings to respond to the latest analytical tools – big data, machine learning, and individualized health care, among others.

I would also like to expand our health systems classes a bit, since that’s my big applications area these days. I’ll also use the position to identify students who might be better served in one of our premium programs such as the M.S. in Analytics – or maybe even our Ph.D. program. We get so many incredible students, it’d be nice to cherry-pick some of them to stay around for even more fun in ISyE.

You have a reputation for being an engaging teacher and being popular with students. How does this new position fit in with your teaching philosophy?

Ah, you are too kind. I’ve always enjoyed teaching at the master’s level, where you can mix theory with applications. Our students are bright and provide a lot of back-and-forth synergy during class; that keeps the energy up, especially during discussions on how to apply the math to interesting problems. That’s what we want in our M.S. programs – people who can jump into the real world and take on a variety of projects requiring some mathematical firepower that a normal student (say, from UGA) wouldn’t be able to competently touch. 

What are your responsibilities in this position?

Lots of different things. I supervise the recruitment and admissions of master’s students, monitor their progress, and help to deal with any issues that come up. I see a lot of petition signing in my future. And as I mentioned before, I’ll help to modernize our current programs – maybe develop new ones – and then monitor and report on program outcomes. The good news is that I’ll get to work with Alan, Director of Student Services Dawn Strickland, and Graduate Programs Manager Amanda Ford, who know the lay of the land really well. It probably helps that I’ve been in ISyE since about the late 1940s, and I used to shadow our previous graduate chair, now-Professor Emeritus Gary Parker, as he carried out his responsibilities.

You seem to like math. Do you happen to know the loneliest number?

Yes, it’s well-known that one is the loneliest number. But, of course, two can be as bad as one.

About Professor Goldsman

Goldsman’s research interests include simulation output analysis, statistical ranking and selection methods, and medical and humanitarian applications of operations research.

He has published extensively, and has over 75 publications in such bellwether journals as Management Science, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, IISE Transactions, and Sequential Analysis. He has also co-authored about 20 book chapters, as well as the texts Design and Analysis of Experiments for Statistical Selection, Screening and Multiple Comparisons, with Bob Bechhofer and Tom Santner, and Probability and Statistics in Engineering (4th edition), with Bill Hines, Doug Montgomery, and Connie Borror.

Goldsman and Christos Alexopoulos won the INFORMS Simulation Society's 2007 Outstanding Simulation Publication Award for their paper “To Batch or not to Batch?” which appeared in ACM TOMACS in 2004. In addition, he, Alexopoulos, Claudia Antonini, and Jim Wilson won the IIE Transactions 2010 Best Paper Prize in Operations Engineering and Analysis for their 2009 paper “Area Variance Estimators for Simulation Using Folded Standardized Time Series.” He received the INFORMS Simulation Society's Distinguished Service Award in 2002. Goldsman also received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006 to lecture at Boğaziçi and Sabancı Universities in Istanbul, Turkey. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers.

Goldsman is an active consultant, having undertaken various projects in the health care, airline, automotive, fast food, hotel, and banking industries, among others.

The question is, how do we get there with the right policies and investments — and without so many bumps in the road that public trust erodes along the way.

“There will be a critical transition period from where we are today to get to that future where we will have what I call ‘connected autonomous transportation.’ And transportation engineers will play a key role,” said Srinivas Peeta, the new Frederick R. Dickerson Chair in civil and environmental engineering. “There is the need to inform policy. There is the need to understand what type of solutions would lead to a smooth transition versus a rough one, which leads to loss of trust at the public level.”

Peeta, who holds a joint appointment in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, said we’re already seeing harbingers of rough patches, with stories about autonomous Uber vehicles striking and killing a pedestrian or the Tesla owner who died when his car crashed using the Autopilot feature.

“[Losing public trust] can be as simple as people perceiving what we have today as autonomous vehicles, which are not,” he said. “We're not yet at the level where we're looking at a mature autonomous transportation system. It's not just about the vehicle. It's about the human knowing how to interact with these vehicles, both within and outside. And the other thing is the infrastructure. Our infrastructure is built for the vehicle of the past hundred years.”

Enter Peeta’s decades of research on transportation systems from what you might call a 30,000-foot view — and what engineers call a system-of-systems perspective. Peeta studies transportation in the context of all the connections those systems have to other systems: power, water, natural gas distribution, telecommunications, and more.

“We look at problems holistically rather than just looking at one aspect of a problem, seeing the connections across, which is how societies are set up,” he said.

Autonomous and connected transportation systems are a natural outgrowth of Peeta’s system-of-systems approach because it involves the complicated interactions of people, vehicles and infrastructure and it demands a multidisciplinary approach. He has long studied traveler behavior and predicting traffic conditions to help drivers make better decisions on the road — a research area called dynamic traffic assignment, where Peeta set the standard for research.

In recent years, his work has included using a driving simulator to understand how drivers think and process information.

“The simulator allows us to look at not just what information people have and how do they act on it, but also what is their ability to process such information?” Peeta said. “Part of the question is, what information, how do you deliver that, at what level, and when, so that people can beneficially use it. Whether they choose to use it or not is a different thing, but at least they can absorb it safely.”

Peeta has been correlating brain activity and eye movement to what drivers say they think and do behind the wheel in an effort to inform designs for the future. Vehicle manufacturers need to know how to offer information to drivers — or “passengers” in an autonomous car — and government agencies need to know what information is valuable and how to provide it to vehicles.

“They are questions that need to be answered as we transition to this fully autonomous, connected world,” he said.

Assuming Peeta can help make that transition a smooth one, he paints an idyllic picture of a future that blends individual autonomous vehicles, public transportation, and even reshaping our urban environment, all in the service of making people’s lives better, creating more sustainable cities, and capitalizing on emerging technologies.

“There's this trend of urbanization that's going on worldwide. Cities are getting bigger and bigger, and along with that are imperatives related to sustainability,” he said. “How do you make a place livable? And does livable means having to fight through traffic or having to struggle through a lot of what we consider day-to-day activities? Or can we enhance that in some ways?”

Peeta said that’s why Georgia Tech was such an attractive place to continue his work after more than two decades at Purdue University.

“If you really wanted to test and look for impact, what better place to start than Atlanta, which has horrendous traffic situation right now? Urban sprawl as well. You know, Georgia Tech is situated right in the heart of it,” he said.

Tech also offers Peeta connections and access to industry leaders, especially the kinds of tech companies working in areas related to connected and autonomous vehicles. He said he’s energized by the challenges ahead and the opportunity to work across many different fields at Tech to create that future vision he described.

“If you listen to people who have been in transportation engineering, who have been around for say 30, 40, 50 years, they'll say, ‘I can't think of a better time to be in this field, simply because of what potential exists going forward,’” Peeta said. “The opportunity to solve problems that will impact society — that’s what’s attractive to me.”

Her research interests are in statistical learning with emphasis on design and analysis of algorithms for network inference. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER and AFOSR YIP awards and UIUC’s College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research.

She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in ECE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003 and 2006, respectively. She earned her B.S. in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 1999.

To help address these issues, the 10^th Annual Health & Humanitarian Logistics Conference (HHLC) brought together leaders and practitioners from around the world to address topics such as health emergencies, health systems strengthening, and disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. HHLC is one of the few conferences that brings representatives from both health and humanitarian arenas together to highlight such challenges and share best practices. It also serves as a forum for collaboration and coordination across multiple sectors and organizations.

“The motivation for convening this conference has been two-fold: to address natural and man-made disasters that affect thousands of people every year, as well as ongoing development needs in health and well-being, nutrition, education, and other key areas,” said Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), the College of Engineering’s ADVANCE Professor, and co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS).

This year’s conference was held on July 18 and 19 in Dubai, UAE. The conference featured numerous workshops and panel discussions, with approximately 200 speakers and attendees from 44 countries and 122 organizations, including world leaders in the health and humanitarian sectors, current and former ministers of health, representatives from governmental and non-governmental organizations, industry, foundations, and academia.

The conference began with a keynote presentation from Jagan Chapagain, the Under-Secretary-General for Programmes and Operation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Chapagain discussed the many challenges faced during public health emergencies and the strategies to strengthen the system to better meet the needs of the public during normal times and beyond.

“Strong health systems help prevent humanitarian crises,” explained Chapagain. “They provide a basis for early interventions so that quick action can be taken to stop the spread of epidemics and also help reduce the impact of non-communicable diseases. At the same time humanitarian issues could provide the necessary resources and impetus to strengthen the health systems in the countries affected by crises. Each approach reinforces the other.”

“We hope that the presentations and discussions the conference hosted over the years help us articulate the pressing challenges related to health and humanitarian systems and inspire new ideas and practices toward positive change,” added Keskinocak. “Given the complexity of these problems, collaboration among different entities is essential in generating sustainable solutions. We hope that the conference will continue to foster new partnerships and synergies across the many different organizations represented by the attendees.”

While CHHS carried the torch in kick-starting and organizing the conference in Atlanta during its first three years, other organizations, including INSEAD, MIT Humanitarian Response Lab, Northeastern University, and NC State, joined as co-organizers over the past seven years, also in collaboration with People that Deliver and the International Association of Public Health Logisticians in 2018.

Previous conference locations include the United States, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, and Denmark.

Conference organizers are grateful for the generous sponsorship from key partners. UPS Foundation has been the premiere sponsor for nine consecutive years, and other sponsors include Chemonics, The Coca-Cola Company, Imperial Health Sciences, Imres, ISyE, Johnson & Johnson, Kühne Stiftung, Partnership for Supply Chain Management, Ryder, Pfizer, Walmart, and William Davidson Institute.

In addition to the conference, CHHS offers an annual professional certificate in Health & Humanitarian Supply Chain Management. The intensive six-day course brings together international participants in global health care roles to learn how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations.

To learn more about CHHS and its activities, visit www.chhs.gatech.edu.

Cummings, whose research interests lie primarily with data privacy, algorithmic economics, optimization, connections to machine learning, information theory, and statistics, begins The Simons-Berkeley Fellowship in Data Privacy next January at the University of California, Berkeley’s Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

The program works to foster new collaborations between researchers who focus on the theoretical aspects of data privacy and those who work in areas where the theory could practically be applied. With several large data breaches in the past few years (Facebook, Equifax, and Wells Fargo just to name a few), the need for new technology and ways of thinking about data privacy is much needed.

Cummings and her co-fellows will spend the semester researching basic privacy-related statistical, algorithmic, and game-theoretic questions. They will also explore methodologies for bridging gaps that exist between approaches to privacy that are related to law, ethics, and social norms versus mathematics-based approaches. The fellows will also study barriers that prevent theoretical privacy research from being implemented and what solutions can be created to overcome these barriers.

In addition to her fellowship, Cummings received the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention for her 2017 doctoral dissertation titled, The Implications of Privacy-Aware Choice. The award recognizes an “outstanding dissertation in the field of economics and computation” and was chosen by a panel of judges from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and Microsoft Research New England. The award was presented at the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation in June at Cornell University.

Cummings is teaching supply chain economics at Georgia Tech’s campus this fall.

This is exactly what Cheryl LaFoy was tasked with in the spring of 2013. At that time, LaFoy was the facilities and operations manager for the Georgia Tech Athletic Association (GTAA). How did she handle such a logistics crazy-maker?

“The best year of my life was getting married,” recalled LaFoy in a recent interview. “It was a time when I put the ISyE skills I learned together with both my career in athletics and my own wedding. That was such an emotional high for me, getting to excel both professionally and personally.”

All told, LaFoy spent 16-plus years working for the GTAA – four years as a student assistant while an undergraduate in Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (BSIE 02), and then 12 years in both GTAA communications and athletic operations. Eventually, as the director of event operations, LaFoy oversaw GTAA’s 17 varsity athletic programs, which included football Saturdays at Bobby Dodd Stadium. In addition to the back-to-back national championships in 2013, she also directed the 2016 NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships. 

During the championships, movement of 300-plus student-athletes; over 3,000 attendees; more than 125 volunteers; and more than 25 staff members in and out of the Campus Recreation Center – which remained open to the rest of campus – presented LaFoy with a new set of challenges. She relied on experience gained during her Senior Design project with Kroger to ensure success. 

“My Capstone project involved the reconfiguration of a distribution center for Kroger, but the part of the project that fascinated me most was the constant flow and optimization of items in and out of the center,” LaFoy said. “It was the same for these two weeks of championships: Athletes arrive and depart, with several overlaps, on three different occasions during the day, in addition to volunteers and staff coming and going for the two daily sessions. Maximizing their experience by decreasing wait times and minimizing our costs by using ideal time frames for various required components of hosting the championships provided a huge win for us on a national level.”

Happy with her role at GTAA, LaFoy wasn’t looking to move on. But in spring 2016, she received a call from Theresa Wenzel, president of Atlanta’s WNBA team, the Dream. LaFoy knew Wenzel from Wenzel’s time as assistant athletic director at GTAA. Wenzel invited LaFoy to be entirely in charge of the Dream’s business operations.

It was a tough decision.

“I had only managed game operations for Georgia Tech Athletics, but when I had the opportunity to work in championships, that’s where I had a larger impact with budgeting, corporate partners, and working with the community. However, that was very limited – just a few days each time, so I was hesitant,” LaFoy said. “I loved working in athletics, but I wondered if I needed a different challenge – a challenge that would stretch me a little more.”

Ultimately, in May 2016, LaFoy became the vice president for business and event operations for the Dream.

“I don’t select the players or evaluate their talent,” she explained, “but I’m responsible for nearly all other aspects of the business – marketing, ticket sales, corporate partnerships, finance, and our community involvement. Selling the business, whether to season ticketholders, corporate partners, or the city of Atlanta, is the biggest challenge because of how saturated this market is from a sports standpoint. The bonus we have is that we’re the only female professional team in a seven-state radius.”

One of the most exciting aspects of LaFoy’s current role is the Dream’s connection with the Atlanta community. Working in conjunction with Atlanta’s Department of Parks and Recreation has provided the opportunity to impact middle-school children who come to the city’s recreation centers. The team hosts Dream FIT events, which are 60-minute health and wellness clinics that teach kids about the importance of movement and good nutrition. The team also offers educational opportunities through their work with a community technology partner.

“In some of Atlanta’s underserved areas, the children don’t have computers at home, or regular access to one,” noted LaFoy. “So we give them the chance to learn how to use tech products to gain experience with computers.”

For all children – ages five to 17 years old – the Dream offers STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) programming at a couple of the team’s games each season. Up to 500 children participate in STEAM-based activities before the basketball game, stay for the game, and then have the opportunity to meet one of the Dream’s players after the game is over. The team has increased availability and grown attendance at these STEAM games through partnerships with Georgia Tech – because of Wenzel and LaFoy’s connections to the Institute – and local STEM-based groups such as STEM Atlanta Women and Women in Technology.

“We want children to start thinking at a younger age about all of the things they can possibly be in the STEAM realm, because that’s really what we have a passion for,” LaFoy said. “And what we also see more and more is that kids really want to be involved with the Dream.

“It’s very simple. At the end of the day, our goal here with the Dream is to educate and inspire through the game of basketball. So with every decision we make, I ask whether the decision we’re making supports that mission.”

LaFoy has returned to Georgia Tech with the Dream for the team’s current season, which began on May 26th and runs through August 11th. Traditionally, the team shares Philips Arena with the city’s NBA team, the Hawks. Philips is being renovated, so the Dream plays its home games in McCamish Pavilion.

Amanda drove the family car; Brent, who had a different schedule, rode the school bus. “He had to wake up at 5 a.m. to catch the bus at 6, and he arrived at school at 7:30,” recalled Chu, an ISyE student pursuing a Ph.D. in operations research. “Whereas, I could roll out of bed any time.”

The disparity stayed with her. Years later, when it came time to choose a project in industrial systems engineering, Chu had no problem deciding: school bus schedules.

Her advisor, Professor Pinar Keskinocak, director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, connected Chu with a former student, Monica Villarreal (Ph.D. 2014), a senior planning analyst with Denver Public Schools. The school system wanted to make its bus scheduling more adaptable to changing conditions and avoid having to manually adjust route assignments.

Thus, Chu quickly became a student of the enormously complicated world of school bus schedules. She delved into academic journal articles. She investigated software apps. And she explored a landscape of variables – route distances, passenger capacity, wheelchair vs. non-wheelchair riders, and school “bell times,” to name a few.

Months of work led to a Microsoft Excel-based decision-support tool that gives the school system a new picture of the entire bus fleet scheduling.

“It’s designed to present alternatives,” Chu explained. “It actually generates new bus route assignments, based on entered data, reflecting objectives and constraints. It also helps the school system quickly analyze bus route assignments.”

“We’re using the technology to make routes for our drivers for the 2018-19 academic year,” said Villarreal, senior planning analyst for Denver Public Schools. “Since there’s a shortage of bus drivers here, we have to be as efficient as possible in order to minimize the outsourcing of routes. This new tool will save us time as well as money, which we can then put back into the classroom.” 

Chu is now adapting the technology for Atlanta’s public school system and contemplating a way to bring the program to larger markets.

She received her Ph.D. in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Operations Research Center and a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Gupta's research interests lie primarily in combinatorial, convex, and robust optimization with applications in online learning and data-driven decision-making under partial information. Her work focuses on speeding up fundamental bottlenecks that arise in learning problems due to the combinatorial nature of the decisions, as well as drawing from machine learning to improve traditional optimization methods.

She has worked on providing optimized inventory routing decisions under uncertain demand, and pricing items optimally while incorporating effects of sales and promotions. She has collaborated with industrial research labs such as the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Oracle Retail Data Science Group. Gupta is further interested in exploring strategic behavior of customers, fairness and bias in decisions, and unintended consequences of optimization.

Gupta was the Microsoft Research Fellow at Simons Institute in Spring 2018 and she received the prestigious Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship for the academic year 2017-18. Her collaborative work on systematically evaluating heuristics and understanding which heuristic or algorithm works best on unseen problem instances received a special recognition from the INFORMS Computing Society in their Student Paper Competition in 2016. She was also a finalist for the INFORMS Service Science Student Paper Competition for her work on promotion optimization for retail items. Gupta received the Google Women in Engineering Award in India in 2011.

“Congratulations to Alex for this prestigious award,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “The Dantzig Prize recognizes the extensive contributions he has made to the field of optimization, particularly with regard to simulation-based optimization, stochastic programming, and non-smooth analysis. This honor is very well-deserved.”

An example of application of Shapiro’s research is the work he did a few years ago with Operador Nacional do Sistema Eletrico (ONS) in Brazil. Brazilian power system generation is dominated by hydroelectric sources using large reservoirs. ONS uses a complex computer algorithm that models the system to help ensure that electricity generation meets the demand at minimum expected cost, planning the generation of power based on such information as electricity demand forecast and water inflow scenarios based on the historical data. To improve the system, ONS decided to develop a methodology for adding a risk aversion criterion to the planning model. It contacted Shapiro because of his expertise in optimizing systems using stochastic programming, a technique useful for modeling complex systems when not all input parameters can be known.

The system presented a classic optimization challenge concerning the use of a resource whose future availability could not be determined with accuracy. Shapiro worked with ONS to understand the problem formulation and suggested some modifications that would reduce the risk of energy supply failures. The changes he made rely on stochastic programming, which is often used for modeling optimization programs that involve uncertainty.

The methodology developed by ISyE and ONS could potentially be applied to other power generation systems, as well as to other operations in which uncertain natural resources – such as water supplies – must be used to meet the demand for electricity or other products.

In addition to his work on optimization and stochastic programming, Shapiro's research interests also focus on risk analysis, sensitivity analysis of nonlinear programs, and multivariate statistical analysis.

He has been on the editorial board of several professional journals, such as Mathematics of Operations Research, ESAIM: Control, Optimization and Calculus of Variations, and Computational Management Science. He was an area editor (optimization) of Operations Research and editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming, Series A (2012-17), the flagship journal of the Mathematical Optimization Society.

He has given numerous invited keynote and plenary talks, including a 2010 invited section talk (Control Theory & Optimization) at the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Hyderabad, India. In 2013, he was awarded the INFORMS Khachiyan Prize for lifetime achievements in optimization.

Shapiro accepted the Dantzig Prize at the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, held in Bordeaux, France in July.

Tech went on to win the game 30-24. Jackets players pruned the hedges. And Butker became Tech royalty.

By the time he played his final season for the Yellow Jackets in 2016, Butker had become Georgia Tech’s all-time leading scorer with 337 career points. In his final game, he went 4-for-4 in field goals—including a 52-yarder in Tech’s TaxSlayer Bowl win over Kentucky.

Butker’s college career definitely earned him a chance to compete in the NFL. He started out with the Carolina Panthers, competing against long-time pro Graham Gano. Gano kind of took Butker under his wing, to which Butker partially attributes his success in his pro rookie season.

The Panthers eventually cut Butker from the team, and he was picked up by the Kansas City Chiefs, where he had a stellar first year.

To read more about Butker's first pro season and how he uses his ISyE training to improve as a kicker, click here: http://bit.ly/2n5JaBU

With this grant, Dadush aims to revolutionize the understanding of integer programming (IP), the most popular method used today for finding optimal solutions to real-world optimization problems. Such problems include finding the most efficient way to schedule a train timetable, optimize an assembly line, or to ship goods to customers from an astronomically large set of alternatives.

The future results are expected help modern IP solvers – such as CPLEX, Gurobi and SCIP, currently used ubiquitously in industry – improve their practical performance.

"Daniel continues to conduct groundbreaking research on fundamental problems in algorithms and optimization," said Santosh Vampala, Dadush's dissertation advisor and Frederick G. Storey Chair in Tech's College of Computing. "He won the 2015 Tucker Prize (best thesis in optimization over a three-year period) for contributions to integer programming, lattice algorithms, and deterministic volume computation. Since then, he has discovered new properties of lattices and applied them to derive improved algorithms, most recently to the classical discrepancy minimization problem, in a very general setting. He has also discovered (together with his Ph.D. student) a new, improved, and insightful analysis of the shadow-vertex simplex method, a cornerstone of smoothed analysis."

Dadush is currently a tenure-track researcher in the CWI Networks and Optimization research group. To read more about the research that will be funded by the ERC grant, click here: http://bit.ly/2NRjNyQ.

Clarke’s research focuses on the development and use of stochastic models and optimization algorithms to improve the efficiency and robustness of aircraft, airline, airport, and air traffic operations. Of particular note, his research in aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization, especially as it pertains to the development of flight procedures that reduce the environmental impact of aviation, has been instrumental in changing both the theory and the practice of flight procedure design.

“I like airplanes, and I like solving real-world problems,” Clarke said. “Hence, over the years, most of my research has been in aviation operations research. I’ve also been working more and more closely with ISyE faculty, and having recently begun to expand my research beyond aerospace problems, it made sense for me to make ISyE my home department.”

That research includes work with James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor Martin Savelsbergh on using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the middle link in package delivery, i.e., using UAVs to rapidly transfer multiple packages to a delivery truck that in already in the neighborhood, versus delivering a single package directly from the warehouse or fulfillment center. He’s also been working with Professor David Goldsman, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor Benoit Montreuil, and Georgia Power Early Career Professor Nagi Gebraeel to understand how blockchain technologies might be used within the aerospace and other industries to improve maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) and operations. For example, they are exploring how the recordkeeping and smart-contracting functionalities within the blockchain might be usedboth  to change the way airline operations are managed and satisfy regulatory obligations.

“Aerospace has a lot of regulatory requirements for which the blockchain could be particularly useful,” Clarke explained. For example, one could envision many, perhaps even all, of the steps in the certification process as well as maintenance events being recorded and approved via the blockchain.

In addition to Clarke’s ISyE/AE appointments, he is also director of the Air Transportation Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Clarke was co-chair of the National Academies committee that developed the U.S. National Agenda for Autonomy Research related to civil aviation, and a member of the National Academies committee that reviewed the Next Generation Air Transportation System. He is currently co-chair of the Joint Planning Committee for the AIAA-AAAF Aviation Noise and Emissions Reduction Symposium (ANERS) and a member of the NASA Advisory Council Aeronautics Committee. Over the years, he has chaired or served on advisory and technical committees chartered by the AIAA, EU, FAA, ICAO, NASA, the National Academies, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

He received the S.B., S.M., and Sc.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, 1992, and 1997, respectively. His many prior honors include the 1999 AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award, the 2003 FAA Excellence in Aviation Award, the 2006 National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lectureship, the 2012 AIAA/SAE William Littlewood Lectureship, and the SAE Environmental Excellence in Transportation Award in 2015. He is a Fellow of the AIAA and is a member of AGIFORS, INFORMS, and Sigma Xi.

Rajesh (Raj) Thakkar is the VP of Digital Industrial Transformation within GE Power’s Global Supply Chain organization. Raj joined GE in 1994 and has held a series of leadership roles in engineering, Six Sigma, manufacturing, sourcing and supplier quality for GE Consumer & Industrial, GE Energy Services and GE Energy Management. Prior to his current role, he served as the VP of Global Supply Chain & Sourcing for GE Energy Connections. Raj holds an MBA from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cleveland State University.

SCL appreciates GE Power's participation in the Supply Chain Innovation Network.

"I'd been on the prowl for a dog for the better part of six months," DeLuca says. "I knew I definitely wanted to get a rescue."

Along comes Penni, a dog in desperate need of a loving home.

Animal rescuers believe Penni spent most of the first part of her life locked in a basement. She was abandoned on the streets of the Bronx, and when police found her she had a sore on her ribcage that was growing a tumor.

A medical evaluation coupled with shelter overcrowding led to a decision to put Penni down. Fortunately, though, the rescue group arrived just in time to save her life and contacted DeLuca hoping he’d be able to provide a good home.

Due to the physical abuse Penni endured, there would be some challenges.

“She was terrified of everything in sight. She was untrusting of every situation. She simply did not want to interact with the world,” DeLuca explains.

He started taking Penni on daily walks to encourage her to explore. She had been confined for so long, DeLuca says it seems like she forgot how to run.

So trips to the dog park and plenty of encouragement helped.

Even still, Penni would sometimes get skittish in confined spaces.

That’s when DeLuca realized what would be the best therapy for Penni.

“This dog loves being outside. I have made a point of seeking different destinations as often as possible,” DeLuca says.

So walks turned into hikes. The duo has explored Zion National Park, Lake Mead, and the Grand Canyon together.

“We share a unique bond when we are out experiencing these events, too. I mean, not everyone can say they have been rappelling with their dog!” DeLuca laughs.

Yes. Rappelling. An amazing transformation for a dog many felt could never recover from the abuse she endured.

Now Penni’s story has been seen more than 50 million times through channels like USA Today and National Geographic. DeLuca chronicles their journeys on Instagram.

The consummate Georgia Tech alumnus, DeLuca kept Penni styled in a Georgia Tech bandanna. She lost the gold neckerchief in a creek on one of her adventures.

When Penni and her human came back to Atlanta for a visit, the Institute made sure she got a replacement — and a good walk around campus.

“It’s so cool to see her here,” DeLuca says.

To follow DeLuca and Penni’s adventures, visit Penni Dog on Instagram here.

Prior to joining Manhattan Associates in 2014, Olin had a 25 year career in supply chain consulting developing domain specialties in distribution operations and warehouse management, supply chain event management and application integration. Olin earned his Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1990. 

SCL appreciates Manhattan Associate’s long history of support of our programs.

In a new Scientific American article, ISyE Professor Eva Lee describes her efforts as lead analyst on a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Emory, the CDC, and Georgia Tech to predict the immunity of a vaccine without exposing individuals to infection -- including flu, yellow fever, and malaria.

To learn more about the success of the DAMIP model that Lee's team developed, and the role of operations research in developing new vaccines, read more here: http://bit.ly/2lHQ4wA.

In order to minimize the impact of such events, Paritosh Ramanan, a Georgia Tech student working on his Ph.D. in computational science and engineering – an interdisciplinary degree housed in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) – is conducting research to optimize power system requirements.

“Let’s say there’s a power grid over the state of Georgia,” Ramanan said. “There are generators at certain points – one might be in Atlanta, one might be Macon, one might be somewhere else. And you’re transferring generated power to consumers all over the state.

“So there are questions that you need to answer with respect to getting the most efficient output from the power system.”

In order to accomplish this task, an industrial engineer needs to come up with an algorithm that takes into account the demand for electricity and how many generators are available and then determines when generators should be operational, based on these constraints.

“This is a very complex problem,” Ramanan noted. “I’m trying to find out if these different power companies can come together and – while keeping their data operations private – try to solve this problem together to achieve computational efficiency.”

In addition to his dissertation research, Ramanan is interested in how governments work. As such, he applied for and was selected to be a 2018 Fellow in the Sam Nunn Security Program housed in Tech’s Ivan Allen College. The program is funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Science, Technology, and Security Initiative, and aims to educate young and mid-career scientists and engineers about national security issues and provide the analytical tools they need to interact with the policy community.

The objective of the fellowship is specifically to apply research being conducted at Tech to policy-making on the state and federal government levels.

“They’re particularly interested in research – whether in health, aerospace, or energy – that can make the nation’s security apparatus more robust,” said Ramanan. “They’re interested in problems that have a security aspect as well. My research is at the very heart of what they’re looking for.”

Ramanan’s research aims to develop an asynchronous decentralized power network. Each power company or subsidiary can retain control of its own infrastructural data but yet also contribute to solving a global problem. In this way, a decentralized approach can very much thrive while simultaneously making the operations extremely robust. Since an asynchronous method does not impede progress of individual players, cyberattacks on multiple participants do not crumble the entire global operation scheme.  

If a network is asynchronous and decentralized, “an attack is much harder to orchestrate to bring down the whole network,” Ramanan explained.

For example, in a conventional decentralized method, all the players cooperate to solve a global problem. However, if even one of them is brought down due to a denial of service attack or an outage caused by human error – such as the massive 2017 Amazon AWS outage, everyone gets stalled, and the progress toward solving the global problem comes to a standstill.

In such a scenario, an asynchronous decentralized method can help. Unlike the synchronous counterpart described above, players can use the latest available information from their peers to keep progressing toward solving the remaining global problem. An asynchronous method can guarantee resiliency throughout the system.

Ramanan is looking forward to sharing his work with policymakers. In spring 2019, he will travel with the other Sam Nunn Security Fellows to Washington, D.C., where they will have the opportunity to meet with officials from federal agencies – such as the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior, as well as with lawmakers.

“Since my research is at this intersection, and since the objective of the fellowship was something very closely related to what I was doing,” Ramanan added, “I thought it would be an amazing opportunity for me to try and find out how this can be used for policymaking at the federal level, as well as at the state level. It has universal applications.”

On May 28, China’s largest retailer, JD.com kicked off the Global Optimization Challenge (GOC). This is a great opportunity to collaborate with partners from all over the world to develop innovative optimization technologies and smart supply chain solutions. The challenge runs through September.

Background

With the availability of an unprecedented amount of data, supply chain operations are required to become increasingly personalized, efficient and flexible. Data-driven decision making technology is enabling the development of innovative supply chain solutions. JD.com, China’s largest retailer, is launching the Global Optimization Challenge to connect business, technology and global industry talent to chart the future of smart supply chain development.

Today, customers are extremely sensitive to service quality. In order to achieve an unparalleled level of customer service, supply chains must be efficient, adaptable and agile. Engineers and researchers must develop solutions that can predict the sales accurately, place orders timely and correctly, and deliver goods to customers quickly and cost effectively.

As the world's first operations research and optimization competition focusing on smart logistics and smart supply chain, GOC has invited leading professors from Tsinghua University, MIT, Georgia Tech and UC Berkeley to provide input and serve as judges. Moreover, JD will provide numerous real data based on the company's unique full-scenarios, full-process operational experience. The outstanding contestants can earn not only from a grand award pool totalling 25K USD, but also a potential career opportunity in JD.com.

Competition Tracks

The 2018 GOC has two competition tracks:

• Urban Truck Routing and Scheduling: Focuses on urban B2B delivery logistics. The objective is to optimize routing to minimize delivery costs subject to various constraints (e.g., vehicle capacity and delivery time).
   
• Smart Inventory Control of Distribution Network: Focuses on optimizing the transfer of inventory from its origin to JD's Regional Distribution Centers to deliver goods to customers as fast as possible. The objective is to optimize replenishment and transshipment decisions to minimize total inventory costs.

The first round of the GOC commenced on May 28th, the second round of the competition will begin in July and the final defense will be held late September. This is a great opportunity to collaborate with partners from all over the world to develop innovative optimization technologies and smart supply chain solutions. We want you to join us in this quest to create and implement the world's most innovative smart supply chain solutions!
 
For registration and more details, please visit our official website: https://jdata.joybuy.com/en/.

If you have any questions, please email to us at goc@jd.com.
 

“We could not be more excited about this honor for Brani,” said ISyE H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “His being selected as director for the statistics program in NSF's DMS reflects his numerous accomplishments in a wide variety of statistical fields – including Bayesian, biostatistics, and statistics in medicine and the environment. We look forward to seeing how, in this appointment, Brani will help advance the DMS mission.”

“This appointment is important for ISyE and BME, as well as more widely for Georgia Tech,” said Vidakovic. “Through it, we will participate in shaping the national research agenda when it comes to engineering and bioengineering data analysis.”

DMS supports research in mathematics and statistics, training through research involvement of the next generation of mathematical scientists, conferences and workshops, and a portfolio of national mathematical sciences research institutes.

Vidakovic’s year-long appointment will begin in September 2018, with the option for him to serve in the position for a subsequent year.

About Professor Vidakovic

In addition to various statistical areas, Vidakovic’s research interests include wavelets and statistical signal and image processing. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has authored or co-authored several books and numerous journal articles.

Vidakovic has served as the former or current associate editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association, Communications in Statistics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, São Paulo Journal of Mathematical Sciences, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, and Bayesian Statistics.

He holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Purdue University.

“We couldn’t be more excited for Andy upon his receipt of the NSF CAREER Award,” said Edwin Romeijn, the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair at ISyE. “At this stage in his career, he has already proven to be a talented researcher. This grant will support the important research he is conducting on optimization and stochastic modeling, particularly with applications in electric energy systems and electricity markets.”

The CAREER grant amount is $500,000. Sun’s project is titled “Data-driven Dynamic Adaptive Optimization for Next Generation Power System Operation.” With this grant, he will examine what happens when power companies add more renewable energy resources to their systems.

“Wind and solar are growing pretty fast in the U.S., so they add considerable uncertainty into the system,” Sun said. “This changes the power system from a deterministic one to a stochastic system.”

In other words, because renewable resources are largely weather-dependent, it has become increasingly challenging for power companies to predict their availability in forecasts. Sun is working to develop a methodology that allows for incorporating advanced uncertainty models of renewable resources into the optimization of daily power grid operations. The goal of Sun’s work is to increase the robustness – or reliability – in energy systems.

“This is very important for power systems because you want the power system to be functioning. So, reliability is the first priority,” Sun said.

The new framework proposed by Sun will significantly improve power system reliability over the existing practice and at the same time save cost.  

The second aspect of Sun’s grant work will focus on understanding the mathematical structures of physical flow models in the power system. The so-called power flow model is a fundamental building block of almost all aspects of power system operations. The physics of voltages and currents dictates a highly complex mathematical object, which, despite intense research over the past several decades, is still poorly understood. Sun’s recent work with his students and collaborators sheds new light on how to develop new formulations for the power flow models. This may lead to deeper understanding and new algorithms for managing large-scale power grids.

Three power companies supported Sun’s grant proposal and are collaborating with him on his research, which will run through February 28, 2023: 1) ISO New England, which is the system operator of six states in the Northeast electricity market, focusing on a long-term collaboration advancing robust optimization for its power system; 2) Southern Company, the largest utility company in the Southeast, focusing on short-term trading and long-term investment of renewable energy resources; and 3) RTE, the French transmission system operator, whose engineers invented the optimal power flow problem and are working with Sun to solve this fundamental problem.

About Anderson-Interface Early Career Professor Andy Sun

Sun is an assistant professor in ISyE. His doctoral thesis won the second prize of the 2011 INFORMS George B. Dantzig Award, given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. His paper, “Adaptive Robust Optimization for Security-constrained Unit Commitment Problem” has been highly cited and helped form a new area of research of optimization under uncertainty in electric power systems.

Sun’s research has also won several paper awards, among which, “Multistage Adaptive Robust Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem” won the first prize of the 2017 INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment Section Best Paper in Energy Award. “An Adaptive Optimization-based Load Shedding Scheme in Microgrids” received the Best Paper Award at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2018. He has had numerous papers published in flagship journals in both power systems and operations research, such as IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming.

In 2011, he received a Ph.D. in operations research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University. Before joining ISyE, Sun spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Led by ISyE’s Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and professor, director of the Physical Internet Center, and co-director of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL), the research team includes James C. Edenfield Chair and Professor and SCL co-director Martin Savelsbergh; Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor Chip White; Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera; David M. McKenney Family Early Career Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Machine Learning Sebastian Pokutta; Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professor Alejandro Toriello; and A. Russell Chandler III Early Career Professor George Lan; and engages dozens of graduate student researchers. 

Shenzhen is China’s fastest growing high-tech megacity. Considered the Silicon Valley of China, the city sits on the Pearl River Delta and borders Hong Kong. With a population of 18 million people, Shenzhen has the highest gross domestic product per capita among medium and large Chinese cities. The Shenzhen port is the third largest container port in the world.

In 2017, ISyE researchers traveled to Shenzhen where they met with representatives from SF Express, the largest logistics company in China, to discuss partnership opportunities. The discussions led to the co-development of several multi-year research projects, some of which will focus on the data-driven design and operation of both inter-city and intra-city logistics service networks, as well as the design and operation of smart hyperconnected fresh supply chain solutions.  

The smart hyperconnected intra-city and inter-city logistics service network projects center on enhancing delivery performance, respectively between cities across China and within China’s megacities. Both projects aim to enable expanding coverage, enhancing service, and improving speed efficiency, cost-effectiveness, agility, sustainability, and resilience.  Both favor a data-driven approach adapted to the cultural, economic, demographic, and geographic reality of China and its global connectivity. They will establish models and methods for designing flexible service network configurations and operating those configurations efficiently and cost-effectively, which will, in turn, be assessed, improved, and enhanced after initial implementation. 

As SF Express invests in developing end-to-end supply chain for delivering fresh products, the hyperconnected fresh supply chain project builds on the smart intra-city and inter-city logistics systems projects currently underway. This project will lead to the development of the framework and methodologies for designing and operating smart hyperconnected fresh product supply chain solutions. The project will support SF Express in pilot testing the overall concept and approach for targeted fresh products. 

All projects will draw on machine learning, optimization, simulation, and systems design methodologies, and will use Physical Internet concepts and principles to design hyperconnected logistics networks and supply chain solutions.

Describing the impact of the partnership with SF Express, Montreuil said, “This is a tremendous opportunity for the faculty and students involved, and strategically positions Georgia Tech, ISyE, SCL, and the Physical Internet Center in China, advancing our position at the forefront of smart city, Physical Internet, and logistics innovation across the world.”

Prior to joining ISyE, Haigh served as the senior manager of executive relations and marketing at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. She was responsible for marketing and growing the Executive MBA and professional education programs, building relationships with prospective Executive MBA students and corporate partners, and maintaining strong alumni engagement. Prior to joining Scheller, Haigh worked in internal communications roles for Randstad USA and Philips Consumer Electronics.

Haigh earned her B.S. in management and marketing from Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and her M.S. in public relations from Syracuse University.

Big data will finally reach maturity when you don’t see it. It will be everywhere in our lives, but it’ll be invisible. That’s where data is heading.

Right now, we’re at a stage where the information is there, and we’re trying to figure out what to do with it. People believe data is money, so most companies are harvesting data in very aggressive amounts. But so many companies still don’t know what to do with it. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Instagram – those are the places where the business model is based on data. But, not many others have figured out how to work with it. The data is stored in different places, it’s not actionable, or it’s in an unstructured heap.

So, companies can get paralyzed by the huge amounts of data. And if there's a company not already working effectively with big data, it’s hard to hire top talent, because the top talent wants to go to Google and Facebook. Few are interested in working on machine learning and big data at a traditional, brick-and-mortar business.

And there’s a more fundamental thing: The companies that want to get into the game should hire a head of innovation who hasn’t been trained in, and doesn’t conform to, conventional standards. The worst thing these companies can do is miss the opportunity to hire a risk-taker as head of innovation simply because he or she would not conform to the typical board- and chairman-approved codes. You have to aggressively hire top, young talent for leadership positions to get ahead and to make innovation a key component in the corporate DNA.

For example, Macy’s understands that big data innovation is critical for success. They’ve sponsored various big data projects at Georgia Tech, and we designed solutions for their needs. One solution was prepackaged inventory, or using data to predict what people will be ordering, so that they can pre-package the items and then slap an address label on them.

This helps balance worker demand. At peak times, they’re sending, and in slow times, they’re packaging.

When you have erratic demand, you want to avoid having your workers busy one day, but not the next. You want to reassign workload.

Where’s it all going? The only reason businesses collect all this information is to make decisions. In the future, you’ll see more autonomous systems as you go through your day. They’ll be processing very large amounts of data immediately to make decisions for us.

Sebastian Pokutta works at the intersection of theoretical frameworks and practical applications of big data. As the David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (and an associate director of Georgia Tech’s Center of Machine Learning), he has led more than two dozen research projects in big data, machine learning, and optimization with a wide range of companies.

Second place team was Gradient Descent with team captain Jeh Lockhande (MS Analytics 2018), and team members Arora Mansi (MS Analytics 2018), and Nabila Usmani (MS Analytics 2018). While third place went to Once & Future Champions with team captain Michael Behrens (MBA 2019), and team members Nicole de Vries (MSA 2018), James Jolly III (MBA 2019), Ben Perkins (MBA/MSA 2018), and Sara Winkle (MBA 2019).

Fierce competition marked the entire contest, with fourteen teams submitting first-round proposals. Seven teams were then selected by a panel of judges to proceed to the final round. "The Master Modeler Competition has been a great way to see how the innovative minds from Georgia Tech solve problems," added Amazon Supply Chain Data Scientist and Georgia Tech Scheller College alum Paul Stroup (MBA 2010).

The competition culminated with live presentations from the finalist teams Thursday, March 29, at Scheller College of Business with Amazon representatives, faculty, and members of the Business Analytics Center Executive Council serving as judges for the team presentations. "A big thank you goes out to Amazon, our sponsoring company, and all of the faculty and industry analytics leaders who helped ensure a great competition this year," said Keith Werle, Managing Director of the Business Analytics Center at Scheller College of Business. "Not only was it fun and very challenging for our students, but this competition provided a hands-on opportunity for our students to stretch their analytics knowledge and experience to develop innovative approaches to a real-world business problem. These challenges help galvanize the classroom and experiential learning we provide here in Scheller College's business analytics programs."

About the Business Analytics Center at Scheller College

The Business Analytics Center serves as a platform for business analytics efforts, bringing together organizations, analytics thought leaders, talented students, and a world-class, interdisciplinary faculty at Georgia Tech to educate and exchange best practices for applying analytics to solve business problems.

Thomas has been active in a wide variety of research areas including nuclear arms control, energy policy, high-energy physics, environmental sustainability, and technology assessment. Her collaborations are equally varied, including colleagues from academia, and the public and private sectors. The nature of her collaborations and diverse subject expertise has resulted in research that engages the public and has had meaningful impacts in policy making. The award will be presented at the annual Georgia Tech Faculty and Staff Honors Luncheon to be held on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

Thomas holds a joint appointment in the Stewart School and in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include energy systems, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Her current research projects include the environmental impacts of biofuels and electricity system policy and planning.

Thomas is a member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. In 2004-2005, she was the American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society, and has been a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board. She is currently a member of the board of the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and a member of the Federation of American Scientists Board of Experts. 

She has previously worked at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Thomas received a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Keskinocak is a co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems (CHHS), an interdisciplinary research center at Georgia Tech. CHHS aims to transform health and humanitarian systems through education, outreach and innovative solutions. In bestowing this award, the Faculty Honors Committee recognized Keskinocak’s leadership of CHHS, as well as her efforts to promote health and humanitarian services through the professional education Certificate Program for Health and Humanitarian Supply Chain Management (HHSCM).

Letters from industry, fellow colleagues, and program graduates further underscored the value of these efforts. For example, Marta Wnorowska, supply manager with Doctors Without Borders, said, “Sometimes (especially when working in emergencies), it is not possible to find time, reflect more, and go more into details of the tools, techniques used. Training at Georgia Tech has given me this opportunity: to step back, to think more and to get a more technical approach. Overall, the training has given me an irreplaceable opportunity to improve my skills as a supply manager.”  

Former ISyE colleagues Özlem Ergun and Julie Swann are honorary recipients of the award, as they co-founded CHHS and jointly developed the HHSCM certificate program together with Keskinocak.

Keskinocak expressed her gratitude to The UPS Foundation, Andrea L. Laliberte, Pete Quinones, and Richard E. and Charlene O. Zalesky, for their generosity in providing scholarships to support a select subset of HHSCM participants. Joe Ruiz, the director of the UPS Humanitarian Relief and Resilience Program noted, “By training and mentoring professionals as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the courses and research projects, Professor Keskinocak strives to promote access to quality education in this area to improve health and humanitarian systems and human lives worldwide.”

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling, evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; and centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and health care providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and the Task Force for Global Health.

Keskinocak donated the award prize as a "seed gift" toward creating a permanent endowment in support of CHHS. If you are interested in making a gift toward the fund, in honor of the center's outstanding work, please contact ISyE's Director of Development Nancy Sandlin at nsandlin@isye.gatech.edu.

“The spring semester Capstone design teams worked on projects with clients large and small, and across a number of industry segments, from health care to breweries. It was very difficult to select four finalist teams, and the four selected were very representative,” said Leon McGinnis, professor emeritus and Senior Design coordinator. “These teams, and the other 20 Senior Design teams, demonstrate once again the breadth of opportunity and the depth of excellence for our graduates.”

“This semester we had many outstanding teams who brought great value to their clients. ISyE should be proud of its senior undergraduates who contribute to our No. 1 ranking,” added George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair, Institute Professor and Senior Design coordinator.

Senior Design team Textron’s project goal was to increase the throughput of Textron’s TUG tractor manufacturing line. The team used an optimization model to rebalance the manufacturing line, verified this output in a simulation model, and synchronized the workers on the line using Lean tools. If Textron implements this design, the daily tractor throughput will increase by 50 percent. This will enable them to meet demand and capitalize on their backlog to increase yearly sales by $20 million.

“Working with this Senior Design team on improvements for our baggage tractor line was a phenomenal experience from start to finish for the whole Textron GSE team,” said Adam Martin, quality and CI manager of Textron’s TUG technologies. “The team not only worked hard on developing solutions to improve our processes but also considered change management and impact to the assembly team as part of their solution as well.

“I was incredibly impressed at the team’s dedication to ensuring each change was not only good on paper but practical for the assembly team. Their project has provided us the data and tools necessary to tackle large volume increases in the coming months. Each and every team member has a bright future ahead of them,” added Martin.

Textron team members included Lauren Boulger, Jonathan Edwards, Cal Elwer, Erin Gant, Taylor Green, Charlie Lebby, Sam Millson, and Nitin Singh. They were advised by Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor Shabbir Ahmed.

Senior Design team Cycle-Ops partnered with Relay Bike Share to reduce the number of understock events. Understock events occur when a user attempts to rent a bike but finds a station is empty. To minimize understock events, the team solved an optimization model using Python code, which was given to Relay as a decision tool. When the team’s solution is implemented, Relay will see an 84 percent reduction in understock events. As a result, Relay can make, on average, $27,300 in additional yearly revenue.

Cycle-Ops team members included Elizabeth Ball, Brianna Honeywell, Harika Kankipati, Suzanne Kastens, Ije Okafor, Heer Patel, Nicole Redder, and Kaitlin Rizk. They were advised by Professor Rentao Monteiro.

The FLEETCOR Senior Design team worked with FLEETCOR to modernize the company’s antiquated sales process of cold-calling customers. They applied data-driven industrial engineering techniques and developed an expected revenue-based lead-prioritization decision support tool employing machine learning models. The team projected the impact of their work would lead to an increase of 71 percent in new customer revenue.

FLEETCOR team members included Cameron Anderson, James Bottoms, Paul Benning Davis IV, Preston Devaney, Langdon Hollingsworth, Yu (Ryan) Hu, Alex McAuliffe, and Nyles McLean. They were advised by Professor Shijie Deng.

Senior Design team Shaw Industries partnered with the company to revamp its reverse logistics process for returns. They redistributed the work from one central facility to 29 regional distribution facilities around the country. These regional facilities equipped them with an extensive desktop application that iterates through possible return decisions and returns both the top five feasible options and the costs associated with them. By rerouting returns to be more cost-effective, as well as standardizing processes and reducing holding time, this team saved the company over $740,000 per year.

Shaw Industries team members included Talia DeBenedictis, Sarah Edwards, John Preston Green, Kara Pendley, Sean Ruff, Nick Shepherd, Katherine Sledjeski, and Jacqueline Weiland. They were advised by Professor Alexander Shapiro.

Senior Design team FedEx Fleet Mix, which took home the ISyE Judges’ Choice Award at the Capstone Expo, worked with FedEx to optimize the fleet mix of delivery trailers in order to minimize operational costs while keeping the service quality unchanged. Elements of the problem formulation included enforcing capacity constraints, ensuring service standards were upheld, and transporting cargo via rail at a reduced cost per mile rate. By thoroughly analyzing the cost-factor tradeoffs of alternative trailers and developing an optimization-based scheduling tool, the team proposed a change to the fleet mix that can be obtained by the company within the next trailer acquisition cycle. The team’s project will save the company $200,000 per week in operational costs when implemented.

FedEx Fleet Mix team members included Catherine Burns, Soheil Faghihi, Jackson Fan, Raghav Garg, Grant Herman, Ziwei Miao, and Alex Wandrick. They were advised by Professor Shijie Deng.

 This is where Decatur, Georgia-based nonprofit MedShare comes in: Since its inception, the organization has collected over $207 million worth of medical supplies and equipment. In 2016, according to a 2017 article in Pro Publica, “MedShare … sent 156 containers of discarded medical supplies to developing countries … each one worth as much as $175,000.”

MedShare’s challenge is that delivery of goods to medically underserved communities is based on donations, and thus the nonprofit has no control over the types of products it receives from hospitals and corporations. Additionally, MedShare serves recipient hospitals or health care organizations in nearly 100 countries, increasing the challenge of figuring out what should be sent where.

For example, said Can Zhang, different locations may need different equipment: “A maternal care hospital will need more baby warmers than will a hospital focusing on primary care.” Zhang is a recent graduate of Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and is now an assistant professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

“In this particular case,” Zhang explained, “the traditional supply chain approach of matching supply to demand doesn’t work. As a result, about 70 percent of the donated equipment ends up wasted, because they are not actually usable, or the items are inappropriate for the beneficiaries.”

Working with ISyE George Family Foundation Early Career Professor Turgay Ayer, and Dunn Family Professor Atalay Atasu and Brady Family Chair in Management Beril Toktay in the Scheller College of Business, Zhang developed a model whereby MedShare solicits “wish lists” from the recipient organizations. These groups rank needed products in order of priority, and then MedShare matches their medical product inventory to these lists. MedShare has implemented the model.

Zhang is working to further refine the matching process. Whereas in previous years, MedShare focused on quantity – the number of containers they shipped out – the nonprofit now wants to focus on quality – how many people they serve and how many lives have been improved. This shift in emphasis, Zhang said, will require more detailed measurements of welfare improvement in developing countries.

As the No. 1-ranked graduate program for industrial engineering, ISyE attracts many highly qualified Ph.D. students. Zhang is a standout, having won numerous awards for his research with MedShare (see sidebar). “I am highly motivated to work on problems that have a social perspective, especially those that concern unmet needs and underserved populations,” he said.

Jim McClelland (BSIE 66) was inducted into the Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame. Membership in the Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame is reserved for individuals holding an engineering degree or an honorary degree from Georgia Tech. Those chosen have made meritorious engineering and/or managerial contributions during their careers.

In addition to his undergraduate degree from ISyE, McClelland earned an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. In 2017, Jim was chosen by Indiana’s governor to lead the state’s response to the opioid crisis. He now works full-time coordinating and aligning the relevant resources of numerous state agencies that touch substance abuse issues. After graduating from Tech, he joined Goodwill Industries in Houston, and in 1974 he became president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana. Throughout his career, McClelland was involved in Goodwill’s international development efforts, and he played a significant role in establishing Goodwill operations in South Korea.

He has served on the boards of numerous not-for-profit organizations at local, national, and international levels and chaired several of them. At Georgia Tech, he served on the Class of 1966 50th Reunion Committee and currently serves on the ISyE Advisory Board. He also serves on the Dean’s Council of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and the Board of Directors of Building Tomorrow. In 2009, Jim was inducted into the Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame, and in 2011 he received the Distinguished Entrepreneur Award from the Kelley School of Business. He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate.

Ann Dunkin (BSIE 86, MSIE 88) was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni, which recognizes alumni who have provided distinguished contributions to the profession, field, Institute, or society at large. Candidates are highly placed executives and are actively involved in engineering or management, industry, academia, or government. 

Dunkin is currently the chief information officer for the County of Santa Clara, California. Prior to joining Santa Clara County, she served as an appointee in the Obama administration as CIO of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to her time in Washington, D.C., she was the chief technology officer for California’s Palo Alto Unified School District for five years. Before this, Dunkin worked for Hewlett-Packard for 23 years in a variety of engineering and senior management positions in R&D, IT, manufacturing engineering, software quality, and operations.

Dunkin was named one of Computerworld’s Premier 100 Technology Leaders for 2016. She was also a recipient of a FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership Award in 2015 and a FedScoop Golden Gov Award in 2016. She was named one of DC’s Top 50 Women in Technology for 2015 and 2016 and to StateScoop's Top 50 Women in Technology list for 2017. Dunkin is a member of the Hill Society at Georgia Tech. She is an emeritus member of the Stewart School’s Advisory Board and a member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.

Johnna Stueck (BSIE 03) was inducted into the Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni, which recognizes alumni who have distinguished themselves through professional practice and/or service to the Institute, profession, or society at large. They are on the “fast track” and have made rapid advancement within their organizations. They have also been recognized for early professional achievements by others within their profession, field, or organization. They are considered future leaders in their profession. 

Stueck serves as vice president of manufacturing and logistics for McKenney’s, Inc. She began her career with McKenney’s in 2000 while serving in the cooperative program through Georgia Tech. In 2003, Stueck joined McKenney’s full time as a project manager working on projects such as the Georgia Aquarium, Fayette Hospital, and Piedmont Medical Office Building. In 2008, she transitioned to logistics manager and was responsible for managing purchasing, trucking, warehousing, tools, facilities, and lean improvements for the organization. In 2014, she was promoted to vice president and gained responsibility for managing sheet metal and piping fabrication for the organization.

Additionally, Stueck enjoys traveling with her family, reading with her two children, and giving back to the community by volunteering at The Zone at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Congratulations to Arkadi on this outstanding professional achievement,” said ISyE School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “His selection as an AAAS fellow reflects his long career of making numerous significant contributions to the fields of optimization theory and algorithms.”

In specific, Nemirovski’s research focuses on investigating complexity and developing efficient algorithms for nonlinear convex programs, optimization under uncertainty, applications of convex optimization in engineering, and nonparametric statistics.

Throughout the course of his career, Nemirovski has made significant contributions in several areas. At the age of 27, while on vacation, he invented the ellipsoid method, which is one of the most fundamental developments in optimization.

Later, with Yurii Nesterov, Nemirovski contributed to the development of interior point methods — a second game-changer and breakthrough in the field.

Yet another contribution of his centers on the development, with Ronny Ben-Tal, of the field of robust optimization, which is a modeling contribution. They created a framework that is able to handle uncertainty in problem data.

Along with his AAAS selection, in recognition of his seminal and profound contributions to continuous optimization, Nemirovski has been awarded the top prizes in the field: the 1982 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society (joint with Leonid Khachiyan and David Yudin); the Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1991 (joint with Martin Grötschel); and the 2003 John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (along with Michael Todd). He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2017, the first year he was eligible. Election to the NAE is one of the highest professional honors for an engineer.

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

“Georgia Tech is like home to me now,” Zheng recently said of his extended studies at Tech. Originally from Shanghai, China, the Institute was the first and only school he applied to as a high school senior. Impacted by his engineer father, Zheng wanted to pursue an engineering degree and was specifically drawn to industrial engineering’s combination of math, engineering, and business. When he discovered ISyE’s long-running No. 1-ranked program, Tech was an easy choice.

In 2013, while a third-year, Zheng began working as an undergraduate researcher with ISyE Professor Nicoleta Serban. Serban leads the Stewart School’s Health Analytics group, which had recently acquired thousands of Medicaid records – three terabytes’ worth – from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. According to Serban, Zheng was instrumental in processing the raw data: “He worked closely with the information technology group supporting our project to set up the data infrastructure and database backbone for the medical claims data and created tables for research-specific requirements.”

Eventually – still an undergraduate – Zheng began working on Ph.D.-level research projects related to the Medicaid data. He decided to delay his entrance into the 8-5 working world to continue focusing on these projects as an ISyE Ph.D. student. Because of his undergraduate experience, he was able to lead projects from the very beginning of his graduate career.

One of Zheng’s projects analyzed the pediatric asthma population – a prevalent condition in Georgia – in conjunction with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) and the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH). Zheng developed a novel clustering algorithm to identify the population of children whose asthma was well-controlled, as well as children whose asthma was prone to flare-ups. In the latter cases, Zheng discovered that this could be because of inaccessibility to medical care or because care protocols, such as regularly taking medication, were not being followed. This group is more likely to end up in the emergency room with an asthma attack, resulting in higher costs for Medicaid. Ultimately, Zheng was able to provide some policy models and interventions to CHOA and DPH.

“This project has substantive impact of managing care of children with asthma,” noted Serban. “Richard has demonstrated his ability to learn and contribute in a variety of environments as a highly adaptive, creative problem-solver.” Within the four years of his doctoral study, Zheng has published his research in six top-tier academic journals, presented at multiple conferences, and obtained a U.S. patent.

Zheng will have the opportunity to share his eight years’ worth of experience during the Friday hooding ceremony, as he has been selected as the reflection speaker for the event. This represents for him a particularly high note among his many accomplishments while at Tech. “This has always been on my bucket list,” Zheng said. “I’ve been on both sides of the boat at Georgia Tech – undergrad and grad – which are very different lifestyles from each other. That’s something I think is unique to share with the audience.”

The three-minute speech will give Zheng the opportunity to thank his family, his friends, and Serban for supporting him throughout his academic endeavors. “It’s really the people I met here that shaped my experience at Tech, to help me become a better version of myself,” he added. “I want to also send the message that as we graduate, we become vital members of this community of support and excellence, and we need to … help future generations of Yellow Jackets like we’ve been helped.”

After graduation, Zheng is headed to New York City to work for a hedge fund as a data scientist, focusing on what he calls the “high velocity, high risk” of quantitative trading, which is different from traditional trading methods. “I’ll use what I’ve learned at Georgia Tech – statistical modeling, computational methods, and critical thinking,” he said. “I think it will be a very fine experience.”

The Love Scholarship consists of $10,000 provided by the Gay and Erskine Love Foundation and honors the student with the most outstanding scholastic record. Rizk was chosen from the pool of graduating students from all six of Georgia Tech’s colleges.

“When I found out, I was beyond excited,” said Rizk. “I have worked extremely hard at Georgia Tech, so I was glad it paid off.”

Outside her challenging engineering classes, Rizk has been heavily involved in the creation of a startup called Stempower, which she worked on alongside three of her classmates (including two other ISyE majors). Stempower, which is a registered corporation out of the CREATE-X startup programs, mentors and empowers young girls to be brave, self-confident and willing to explore the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Under Rizk and the other co-founders, Stempower has grown from a local program into an organization with international influence. Rizk hopes that even after she graduates from Tech, she will be able to continue to help Stempower expand.

Rizk’s time at Tech hasn’t been without struggles, and she says that she especially has her family to thank for getting her to where she is now.

“My dad was a huge contributor to my success,” said Rizk. “He motivated me to be an engineer from the beginning and always encouraged me. He passed away recently, so I’ve been thinking about how proud he would have been.”

She wants to thank some mentors at Tech as well: Lecturer Damon Williams and Leo and Louise Benatar Early Career Professor Alejandro Toriello from ISyE; Professor Carol Colatrella, who directs the Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology; Dori Pap, assistant director of the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship; and Chaffee Viets, director of the Office of Special Scholarships. They have all helped her act on her entrepreneurial passion.

Rizk graduated on on May 5, 2018, alongside many of her classmates and the co-founders of Stempower. After she graduates, Rizk is headed to Egypt during the summer to start a new chapter of Stempower and afterwards will be working at Accenture in Washington, D.C.

The masterminds behind Stempower are Kaitlin Rizk (ISyE), Brenna Fromayan (ISyE), Natalie Leonard (PSYC) and Wendy Ng (ISyE). They envisioned and cultivated an organization with the mission to demystify science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), break stereotypes, encourage growth and build self-efficacy for young girls.  The founders developed their startup through CREATE-X, a Tech program with a mission to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students, helping them take their idea to market.

The numbers tell their success story. Since 2016, the program has had more than 200 girls participate. Eighty percent of the girls are now more interested STEM, and 63 percent have higher self-confidence.

“We have them draw an engineer in the beginning, and they'll draw a man in overalls,” said Kaitlin Rizk, a fourth year industrial and systems engineering student and CEO of Stempower. “By the end, they'll draw a woman working in the STEM field.”

The Idea

The founders of Stempower met as freshmen in the Grand Challenges Living Learning Community, a program in which students work in groups to tackle a problem facing humanity. They formed a team that chose to investigate why there are fewer females than males in engineering and why such a low percentage of female engineers are in the workforce (only 13% of engineers in the workforce are currently female).

Almost immediately, they discovered research that showed that girls have lower self-confidence than boys. Also known as self-efficacy, the evidence of this is undeniable – on average, girls are 35 points lower than boys on their SAT scores. In order to attempt a difficult question or even raise their hand in class, girls must be extremely self-confident, while their male counterparts tend to dive right in, according to Rizk.

The group also discovered that once women earn their engineering degrees, many end up leaving the field because they lack female role models and a community of women, resulting in an underrepresentation of female engineers.

The Model

The Stempower team set about improving self-confidence and retention of women in STEM careers, creating a business model that combined mentorship with hands-on experience. They first partnered with Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta.

Once a month, mentors teach fourth and fifth grade troops about speaking up in class. The mentors spend a few hours working with the young girls to teach them confidence-building strategies for the classroom. Each session begins with a short lesson that is intended to help the girls develop their sense of self-efficacy.

“At the end of the day, you can be extremely intelligent, but if you don't believe in your own skills, you're not going to be able to get as far as you could,” said Brenna Fromayan, a fourth year industrial and systems engineering student and a vice president and cofounder of Stempower.

The troop sessions are hands-on, with girls participating in activities like designing prosthetic arms or building circuits. The mentors then work to relate the self-efficacy lesson with the engineering challenge the girls completed.

The Development

After Stempower spent a year fleshing out their idea in the Grand Challenges program and getting started with the mentorship program, they started looking for more help to implement their solution.

CREATE-X provided them with the skills and financial support they needed to make their idea a reality. Stempower participated in the Startup Launch program, which provided them with $20,000 and the resources to transform their program from an idea into a real business. Stempower is now a registered corporation and is moving towards becoming a nonprofit.

As the women of the Stempower team matured, they utilized more of the problem-solving skills that they learned in their engineering classes to manage projects and confront challenges outside of the classroom.

“I think the whole STEM aspect of teaching comes naturally to us, but when you go from a student organization to running a business, there are so many additional factors,” said Fromayan. “It becomes complex pretty quickly. It's definitely been a big learning experience, but I feel like it's been going well so far.”

Eventually, Stempower grew so large that it wasn’t something the four of them could do alone. They recruited other female students from Georgia Tech to become the mentors that would go out to Girl Scout troops and teach the lessons. Now, the original four members have stepped back to run the business, managing the various chapters and developing a roadmap for the future.

The Vision

Stempower has expanded its reach all over the world. There are chapters at Stanford University, Purdue University, University of Tennessee and many other colleges. They have stepped beyond serving just Atlanta-based Girl Scout troops and are investigating partnerships with Girl Scouts of America and with private elementary schools.

There are even chapters in Uganda and Kenya. When Rizk lived in Uganda for a summer, she realized that girls in other countries face some of the same issues that American students.

“One day I was playing with kids after work, and I asked them ‘Who wants to be an engineer?’” said Rizk. “All the girls stared at me and all the boys shot their hands up.”

Stempower’s influence is now international, and they are looking for ways to impact the girls that don’t have mentoring programs in their areas. Their “STEM kit” is one way to do this:  a box containing circuit supplies for a girl to make her name in lights, an action figure and a book with a heroine.

“There's a big gap in the market for STEM toys,” said Rizk. “We went to Target and Toys-R-Us and it was pretty pitiful to see all the Legos branded either masculine or feminine, and there were very few STEM kits for girls. We want something that's really giving girls STEM experience.”

For the four original members of Stempower, graduation isn’t too far off. They are working furiously to make sure that the business is still moving in a positive direction once they graduate. Some of them will continue working with the organization that they cultivated from the ground up, and others will move on to careers in research or industry. Either way, Stempower chapters will continue to provide young girls with the confidence to raise their hand in class.

Moe Trebuchon, Edenfield Executive in Residence and part-time lecturer for ISyE, was inducted as the Advisory Board’s new chair. He will lead the board for a one-year term.

Moe Trebuchon

Moe Trebuchon (BIE 86) possesses more than 25 years of supply chain, strategy, and operational consulting experience having served as a partner in the IBM Global Business Services and PwC Consulting practices.  During his time with these firms, 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.

Throughout his career, Trebuchon’s primary focus has been on assisting clients to achieve impactful business transformation via development of strategies, operational designs, leverage of information technology, and organizational change adoption. In particular, he is considered a subject matter leader in the application of demand forecasting, replenishment, WMS, TMS, order management and omni-channel technology to the order fulfillment and delivery process, having led a broad base of clients through complex technology-enabled change programs. Trebuchon has delivered numerous presentations at conferences and educational forums addressing a broad array of topics spanning supply chain, enterprise transformation, business analytics, benefits realization, and change adoption.

Some of Trebuchon’s specific clients include Walmart, the Home Depot, Macy’s, Belk, L.L. Bean, Kroger, Lowe’s, Costco, JC Penney’s, Kohl’s Department Stores, the Children’s Place, Stage Stores, AT&T Mobility, the Limited, and American Eagle Outfitters.

Dennis Frendahl

Dennis Frendahl (BIE 83) is procurement director, glass and PET packaging, for Diageo’s Asia Pacific region and leads the procurement group’s quantitative analytical activities.  Prior to joining Diageo, he spent 25 years with The Coca-Cola Company working with bottlers around the world to successfully source glass bottles, crowns, and aseptic fiber packaging. He also used his analytical expertise to develop a forensic understanding of the supply base and to develop tools and models to help bottlers understand their procurement spend and to forecast commodity prices.  He was known throughout the organization as the thought leader for procurement e-sourcing.

In his six years with Paragon Consulting Group and Cleveland Consulting, Dennis provided operations and general management consulting services to the food and beverage industry. During his five-year tenure with Frito-Lay, Frendahl rapidly advanced within manufacturing and sales operations.

In addition to his degree from ISyE, Frendahl graduated (highest honors) with an MBA from the University of Chicago specializing in finance.  He currently serves as treasurer for the Coca-Cola Georgia Tech Network and has 34 years of consecutive giving to Roll Call.  He hosts an annual golf tournament that has raised over $150,000 for Georgia Tech freshman scholarships.

Frendahl and his wife, Lisa, live in Peachtree Corners, Georgia.

R. Scott Herren

R. Scott Herren (BIE 84) is the chief financial officer and senior vice president at Autodesk, the company that makes software for people who make things. Herren is responsible for Autodesk’s global financial strategy including operations, corporate development, financial systems, tax, and treasury, as well as the company’s procurement organizations. While at Autodesk, Herren has orchestrated Autodesk’s business-model transformation – shifting from selling perpetual licenses to selling subscriptions.

Prior to joining Autodesk in 2014, Herren was senior vice president of finance at Citrix Systems, where he led the company’s finance, accounting, tax, treasury, investor relations, real estate, and facilities teams and held a variety of leadership roles during his 14-year tenure. Before joining Citrix, Herren spent 15-plus years in senior strategy and financial positions at FedEx and IBM.

Herren currently serves on the board of directors of Proofpoint, Inc., and also serves as a member of Proofpoint’s audit committee. In addition to his degree from ISyE, he holds an MBA in finance from Columbia University.

Richard Lackey

Since 1988, Richard Lackey (BIE 69) has served as president and CEO of Del-Tec Packaging, Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of returnable/reusable and protective packaging solutions for consumer and industrial customers. Prior to this role, he worked as vice president of operations for Swiss-tex/Foam Partners, a new joint venture between U.S. and Swiss firms that produced consumer and industrial OEM polyurethane foam products for Fortune 500 companies. He also has experience in electrical circuit board assembly, working on various NSA contracts, where he achieved Top Secret and Cryptographic Clearance levels.

In addition to his degree from ISyE, Lackey holds an M.S. in systems management from Florida Institute of Technology. He has been a Roll Call contributor since he graduated, an A-T Fund/Tech Fund contributor for 29 years, and has funded the Richard and Judith Lackey ISyE Co-op Scholarship.

He and his wife, Judith, have five children, nine grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Margaret Pate

Margaret Pate (BIE 81) has over 17 years of analytical experience in the electric utility sector. She also has over 17 years of experience in business planning, program and project management, and process improvement in customer service, reverse logistics, and IT software projects in a high-tech environment. She is a Georgia Tech ISyE graduate and part of a three-generation Georgia Tech family.

Pate currently works at North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and previously at Hewlett-Packard. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and treasurer for the IEEE Power and Engineering Society Atlanta chapter. Pate is a registered professional engineer in Texas and holds certifications as a project management professional (PMP) and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (CLSSBB).

Yvette Smith

Yvette Smith (BSIE 90) is the worldwide support engineering leader of the Customer Service & Support Cloud + Enterprise division at Microsoft. Leading a team of over 3,500 support engineers globally, Smith has end-to-end accountability for both the customer support experience and worldwide technical support delivery across Microsoft Azure, dynamics, data, enterprise cloud, and developer technologies.

Prior to this role, Smith was the senior vice president of delivery and professional services for Xerox Corporation’s large enterprise operations in the U.S. In this role, she led a team of over 4,500 professionals responsible for delivering Xerox services to global document outsourcing clients. Prior to Xerox, Smith spent over 17 years at IBM leading a variety of sales and IT services businesses and specialized in selling complex international enterprise solutions and developing the delivery infrastructure to support those solutions.

Smith is a certified systems management consultant and holds an MBA degree from Emory University with an emphasis in international business. She’s passionate about women’s and children’s health and gives back to the community as a board member for the Georgia Tech Women’s Alumni Network and as an ambassador for the Grady Health Foundation.

Graduate Awards

Alice and John Jarvis Ph.D. Student Research Award

This award is given to a Ph.D. student who has shown excellence in student research.

Winner: Xiaolei Fang 

Honorable Mention: Chih-li Sung and Xiaowei Yue

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

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

This award is given to a graduate student who has shown excellence in teaching.

Asteroide Santana

Award presented by: Alan Erera, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies

ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award

This award is given to a graduate student who has shown excellence as a teaching assistant.

Amanda Chu

Award presented by: Alan Erera, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies

Undergraduate Awards

Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers Excellence in Leadership Award

The Leadership Award is given to strong leaders of student organizations in ISyE.

Anna Smith and Karan Agrawal

Award presented by: Chen Zhou, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies (Anna) and Timothy Brown, Managing Director for Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (Karan)

The Evelyn Pennington Outstanding Service Award

This award is given to a senior who has provided exceptional service to the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Graham Burke

Award presented by: Fran Buser, Academic Advisor

ISyE Alpha Pi Mu Academic Excellence Award

The Alpha Pi Mu Honor Society presents $500 to a senior with the best academic achievement, including GPA, rigor of curriculum, research, and other scholarly accomplishment.

Jiachen Shi

Award presented by: Nagi Gebraeel, Georgia Power Early Career Professor and Associate Professor

COE Honors Day Award

The COE Honors Day Award is administered through the College of Engineering and given to the student who, at the end of the third year, has the best academic performance in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Elta Clarke

Award presented by: Natashia Boland, Professor

The Love Family Foundation Scholarship

The Love Family Foundation Scholarship is given each year to a member of the graduating class with the most outstanding scholastic record.  This is the highest honor awarded to a graduating senior by the Institute. The $10,000 scholarship is provided by the Gay and Erskine Love Foundation. 

Kaitlin Rizk

Award presented by: Natashia Boland, Professor

COE Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

The Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award is organized by The Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP) and is awarded to an ISyE student who has demonstrated proficiency and promise in research.

Xiaofan Wu

Award presented by: Siva Theja Maguluri, Assistant Professor

ISyE Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award 

The Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) Award of $500 is given to a current student who has served as an undergraduate TA or grader for an ISyE course for at least one complete semester at the time of nomination. A committee in ISyE selects a recipient based on his or her nomination package and evidence of teaching effectiveness.

Shannon Gerhard

Award presented by: Lauren Silver, MPH, Academic Advisor

Kurt Salmon Associates Scholarship in Industrial and Systems Engineering

The Kurt Salmon Associates Scholarships of $850 are awarded to selected seniors in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The scholarship is based on academic merit and contribution to the School. 

Jakob Robinson, Ida Mizani, Bonnie Yang

Award presented by: Jonathan Lowe, Academic Professional

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Entrepreneurship Award

This award is presented to an industrial engineering student who has demonstrated entrepreneurship while pursuing the BSIE degree. The award of $1000 is to be used toward the student’s business or academics.

Brenna Fromayan

Award presented by: Gabi McGee, KS2 Technologies, Inc.

KS2 Technologies, Inc. Innovative Technology Award

This $500 award is presented to an industrial engineering student who has demonstrated innovative use of technologies while pursuing the BSIE degree.

Maithili Appalwar

Award presented by: Gabi McGee, KS2 Technologies, Inc.

Georgia Tech IISE Student Chapter Student Awards

The student chapter of IISE offers three awards of $1,000 each to recognize those with strong academic performance, service, and leadership.

Outstanding Senior Award

Morgan McCombs

Rising Star Award

Aniruddh Hari

Most Successful International Student Award

Maithili Appalwar

Awards presented by: Arjun Patra, President of Georgia Tech IISE

Data privacy can be a grey area for thousands of companies that use online behavioral data to target consumers every day – from ads on the websites we visit to the coupons we get at the grocery store. These choices are tracked, collected and analyzed en masse. It can help consumers: you watched a certain movie on Netflix, so it suggests another you might like in the same genre. But it can also be intrusive, creating a feeling of ‘big brother’: your running route was recorded by a workout app and shared with others.

Rachel Cummings, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is working to better understand data privacy and how it relates to both human behavior and the economy.

“The issue with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica highlights that data privacy is a highly nuanced issue,” said Cummings. “Unlike traditional data breaches, these two companies were legally sharing data according to an agreed upon contract. The issue in this case is downstream data use: once a person shares their data, who is allowed to use it and for what purposes?” 

Cummings recognizes that challenges exist for companies that want to use their data – they stand to gain valuable insights from it but are hesitant for fear of bad press. So, to effectively capitalize on data in a non-intrusive way, differential privacy can help, which is Cummings’ area of focus.  

Cummings works within the field of differential privacy – a type of database privacy that guarantees the input data from a single individual (your home address, for example) has a very small impact on the output of a computation (Zillow reporting how many people live in a neighborhood, for instance). The goal of differential privacy is to ensure you only learn from the global database aggregate, rather than any specific individual.

Cummings’ lab develops and optimizes the algorithms that support differential privacy for corporations like Google, where data can be turned into dollars. Google uses it when a Chrome web browser crashes. To identify the problem without exposing the search history of users, a differential privacy algorithm is used to strip out personal identifiable user information. It’s designed to protect the privacy of individuals, but still provide Google with helpful information to make their browser service better.

Other Fortune 500 companies, like Apple, are leading the way in piloting differential privacy to make better business decision based on their data. Companies can better understand customer’s preferences, explain why they made the choices they did, and predict their future behavior. The algorithms can also be applied to healthcare and medical records to determine patterns in diseases or discern treatments that work on specific demographics, without violating medical privacy laws.

“With great data comes the potential for great privacy violations,” said Cummings. “As companies make more efficient use of personal data, they must also respect the privacy needs of the individuals who shared their data.  I’m hoping to revolutionize my field, as well as U.S. business practices, by redesigning privacy policies so individuals have some say over how companies use the data they create.”

Cummings plans to continue her work at the intersection of economics, machine learning and data privacy. She proposes that companies need to think about how to incentivize people to share their data, while still giving them privacy guarantees. By striking the right balance between protecting consumer privacy and monetizing data, companies will be able to leverage differential privacy to their advantage.

Roytman was born in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where his father worked as a civil engineer for the Russian government. As a youngster, he lived in Ukraine and spent summers with his grandparents in St. Petersburg, Russia.

During one of these visits, his grandfather – a professor of geophysics and geology – gave him a computer: an IBM 5160 with yellow text and a brown screen. In order to play games on the computer, Roytman had to learn how to write the command lines. This, he said in a recent interview, “was the genesis of everything.”

Eventually Roytman’s family immigrated to the U.S., where he earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign in 2010. While researching IE graduate programs, he heard about Georgia Tech and the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering’s No. 1 ranking. When he visited the Stewart School as an applicant, he met some of ISyE’s “legends”: John Hunter Chair and Professor Arkadi Nemirovski; Professor Alexander Shapiro; and Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Craig Tovey – who ended up being his advisor. These encounters made Roytman determined to attend ISyE.

While a Ph.D. student, Roytman took his first step into entrepreneurship by developing TruckSpotting, an app that shows the location of food trucks in Atlanta. Although TruckSpotting was a fun project – Roytman said he “got a lot of free food in the process” – he came to realize that it was not financially scalable and sold the app, which is still in use today.

After graduating from ISyE in 2012 with a master’s degree in operations research, Roytman took a position with Chicago-based firm Kenna Security, a start-up company that offers a customer-facing vulnerability and risk intelligence platform. He is currently Kenna’s chief data scientist. The Kenna Security Platform enables organizations to work cross-functionally to determine and remediate cyber risks. Kenna tracks and predicts real-world exploitations, focusing security teams on what matters most. Roytman is responsible for building out the core analytic and predictive algorithms – and has earned four patents in the process.

In the midst of this burgeoning data science career, Roytman also has spoken at Georgia Tech’s Expert Jackets, at conferences on cybersecurity, and published research with Dan Geer, the chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in technologies supporting the CIA. He’s on the board of the Society of Information Risk Analysts, as well as the advisory board of CryptoMove, a two-year-old Silicon Valley start-up. He also began developing the Dharma.ai, which enables organizations to collect, understand, and use the ground-level data that informs their activities.

Dharma specifically began three years ago with a project for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where Roytman’s experience with TruckSpotting came in handy. Together with Jesse Berns, a friend who was working as an epidemiologist for MSF in Iraq, Roytman pieced together an iPhone app that tracked data in refugee camps. 

Eventually, Dharma.ai further evolved to enable an organization’s staff at headquarters and managers in the field to monitor activities in real time without Wi-Fi or cell phone service, which isn’t always available. Real-time information is presented with cutting-edge visualizations in the Dharma web and mobile applications. These data are available for export to Excel, or to statistical tools for deeper analysis, and can be piped into a wide range of data warehouses for sophisticated online analytics.  

Currently, some significant humanitarian organizations – the World Health Organization, MSF, Habitat for Humanity, and Save the Children – use Dharma. The company just completed its Series A funding with $10 million coming from The Rise Fund, and was implemented in Texas after Hurricane Harvey.

Dharma is also the reason Roytman was named to Forbes magazine’s “Thirty Under Thirty” in 2017.

When asked what has changed for him since receiving that recognition, Roytman said, “It’s a stamp of approval. It’s not like you don’t have to do your work the next day. That said, Forbes does a great job of networking the 30 Under 30 winners. I get to connect with previous winners who might know about things I don’t and ask for their input. It was like earning an MBA overnight.”

With everything that Roytman has going on, it’s no surprise that he also has a side hustle that he talks about enthusiastically: coffee.

As Roytman tells it, he and some friends would get together on occasional Saturdays in Roytman’s apartment and roast green coffee beans in the oven, which would then be distributed to family and friends. Eventually, they were able to purchase a $30,000 full-scale industrial coffee roaster for the bargain price of $6,000, which – until recently – they operated out of the basement of an apartment building Roytman owns.

“We realized that coffee is getting increasingly more expensive and more complex,” Roytman explained. “There are companies selling their coffee for $25 per pound, but the reality is that 99 percent of consumers don’t have the machinery to extract $25 worth of value out of those beans.”

As an alternative to the current coffee trends, Roytman and three friends opened a coffee shop in Back of the Yards, a blue-collar working neighborhood in Chicago that Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle, and started selling half-pound bags of their coffee online for $6.

“Everything is hooked up to computers, so we roast coffee as an engineer would, rather than as an artisan would, which is actually the correct way to do it,” Roytman said. “Ironically, the software for roasting like an engineer is called Artisan. It qualitatively controls the roasting process, so the result is consistent coffee, which is necessary if you’re going to scale up to opening a coffee shop.”

They named their coffee company Sputnik Roasters – a nod to the fact that Roytman and two of his fellow roaster friends are Soviet refugees. In addition, Roytman mentioned, “It’s a reference to coffee for the masses, the proletariat if you will. Back of the Yards is a craft coffee desert, and demand is high. There are union workers going to work at five in the morning, who want to drink a cup of coffee, but their options are 7-11 or Starbucks. We want to prove that it’s possible to have good sustainable coffee shops the way gentrified neighborhoods have in communities those people don’t typically approach.”

When asked if he would ever leave cybersecurity to focus on coffee full-time, Roytman laughed. “I would be bored if I left either one, honestly. I think cybersecurity is the most important issue of our generation. We built highways in the 60s that allowed our economy to grow; now we don’t live in the physical world, we live in the digital world, and there are no highways there. There’s no infrastructure to protect traffic and to protect consumers. Cybersecurity is largely an afterthought today. We’re building that infrastructure to make sure business can be done safely.”

One project that Wu worked on while at ISyE – of which she still speaks with pride – was a routing project with an international pharmaceutical company. The project had eight team members from six different countries. With support from Professor John Vande Vate, they built a linear programming model that reduced unnecessary changeovers for more than 100 products and achieved a projected 300-plus working days’ savings for one of the company’s main manufacturing plants.

Wu was also able to build on her personal passion for applying supply chain principles to health and humanitarian organizations by enrolling in the Center for Health & Humanitarian System’s (CHHS) Global Logistics Scholars Program.

On a personal note, Wu is especially glad she studied at Georgia Tech: It was here that she met her now-husband, Chenliang Yang, who studied mechanical engineering (BSME 2016).

In the following interview, Wu discusses how the CHHS certification led to her current position with UNICEF as a supply chain analyst, what she does for the organization, and why it’s so important to apply supply chain principles to the work done by health and humanitarian organizations.

Why are supply chain and logistics so compelling to you?

Apart from commercial supply chain, which enables companies to maximize profit, humanitarian supply chain plays an ever-increasing role in providing essential support in the case of regional conflicts or natural disasters.

This is exactly where my passion is. Even though we have achieved great engineering advancements in terms of supporting crisis situations with cutting-edge techniques, there is more to do to optimize the entire process. Saving time and money means saving lives. I want to use my knowledge to make a difference in the world, and studying and working in supply chain and logistics can help me achieve that goal.

During your MSSCE studies at ISyE, you also earned a certification from the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS) in the Global Logistics Scholars Program. Why did you do this?

The CCHS certification program and showed me what supply chain experts can do in the humanitarian arena. Prior to taking this certification program, my expertise focused more on commercial supply chain – the goal of which is profit maximization. The CHHS certification opened my eyes to humanitarian supply chain – for which the ultimate goal is minimizing human suffering.

Since graduating, you’ve been working for UNICEF in Amman, Jordan, as a supply chain analyst. What drew you to this position?

I initially found out about the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) supply chain analyst position from CHHS co-director Julie Swann. I got really excited because I knew this was the opportunity for which I had been waiting.

Given that the Middle East is where many modern conflicts take place, I realized I could devote my knowledge and skills to improving the living conditions for these local communities, especially for children.

From the first day I joined UNICEF, I have worked with colleagues from different countries; their passion for humanitarian work, as well as supply chain, has been a big influence on me.

Describe what you do as a supply chain analyst for UNICEF.

My main responsibility is to develop supply chain monitoring dashboards to alert flags and risks, and to improve supply chain visualization. We have built several dashboards to monitor procurement processes, inventory, dispatches, key grants, services contracts, and container demurrage, and so forth. I have also worked with colleagues from other departments, such as nutrition and health, to create forecasting models for critical items to predict demand. Another responsibility I have is to conduct specific supply chain-related  workshops for key UNICEF staff from different country offices in the MENA region.

Why are supply chain experts so essential to the success of health and humanitarian organizations?

More and more, people are seeing the importance of supply chain functionality in health and humanitarian organizations. Many humanitarian organizations have two “customers”: the people who need help and the donors. How to allocate donations to people in need effectively and efficiently is a question that always need to be answered.

For example, since I’ve been with UNICEF, we have procured different kinds of medications or vaccinations, which required careful, temperature-controlled transportation and storage. This is a big challenge in the hot, dry desert climate. Hence, health and humanitarian organizations really need the help of supply chain experts, to make sure that goods are handled properly – and ideally, at a lower cost. Any money saved means one more child can be helped. 

What do the next three to five years look like for you professionally?

I would like to further develop my skills in and knowledge of humanitarian supply chain, and become a supply chain expert in this area. I am also considering conducting research on resilience in humanitarian supply chain. Supply chain resilience is an important consideration for commercial supply chain in terms of response to and recovery from unexpected events; however, research into the resilience of humanitarian supply chain is much more limited.

That course is Probability with Applications, the first major-related class that all ISyE undergraduates take. Gerhard said that she arrived at Georgia Tech having taken AP Statistics and a few other advanced math courses in high school, and thus assistant teaching for ISYE 2027 was a natural fit for her. Some of her responsibilities include holding review sessions and office hours.

“I really like working under Dr. Foley, because he pushes the students to understand the concepts instead of just regurgitating the material,” she said in a recent interview. “If the students grasp the principles he teaches in 2027, they will be set up for success in the rest of their ISyE classes.”

Gerhard said that being a TA interested her because she wanted to get involved in ISyE more than merely joining a club. She continued, “I wanted to have a leadership role. I’ve always been really intellectual but not as much career-minded. I’d really like to go to grad school and potentially work in academia, so I felt that being a TA would give me a good purview of that.”

Beyond the classroom, Gerhard also served as an undergraduate researcher, working with ISyE’s Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor Yao Xie on Xie’s Big Data project with the Atlanta Police Department. In this capacity, Gerhard helped with the logistics of the process – doing basic data analysis, creating data visualizations, and making presentations. She credits the research project with opening her eyes to the possibilities of how she could apply her ISyE studies and giving her the impetus to get a second degree in CS. “I realized that if I combined CS and ISyE, it’s a powerful double major.”

During her rare free moments, Gerhard indulges in what might be considered a somewhat unusual hobby for a college student: She loves to bake and has an Instagram account (@shannon.gerhard) devoted to photographs of the luscious goodies coming out of her oven.

Gerhardt explained that she first got started in the kitchen through a Christmas tradition she shares with her mom: The two partake in what Gerhardt described as “really extravagant baking sessions.” Eventually, Gerhardt realized that she wanted to expand her baking to more than the holiday season and began baking in her college apartment last summer. She has turned out raspberry white chocolate scones, gorgeous apple pies, fun ice cream sandwiches, and even blueberry macarons – a fragile, merengue-based cookie, among other goodies.

“A lot of my inspiration comes from looking at what food bloggers have done and modifying the recipes or taking out ingredients I don’t like, or trying new methods to create what they made,” Gerhard elaborated. “And some of it is stuff I want to do – like the blueberry macarons. I used a base macaron recipe, but my whole goal was to make them blueberry flavored. That was challenging, in that I had to consider the chemistry behind it.

“That’s another reason I enjoy baking,” she continued. “I really like chemistry, and that’s not something I get to do in school. You have to consider things like putting fruit into ice cream – the water in the fruit will freeze. If you candy fruit instead, then it won’t freeze, and it’ll be the soft texture you want. There are small things like that that I’m able to catch because of the chemistry I learned in high school and here at Tech. I use it to make my food better.”

Baking provides a much-needed stress reliever for Gerhard, amidst the intensity of her school-related demands. “It’s definitely a creative outlet,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll go on baking binges late at night instead of going to sleep, and it relieves the pressure.”

It also teaches her how to handle failure.

“Failing at baking in particular is really annoying, and I get really mad,” she laughed. “I usually just redo the recipe right then and there – I won’t stop until I get it right. I don’t burn things anymore; that happened at first. My biggest fail was probably salted caramel ice cream. I used salted butter and then added more salt, and because salt doesn’t freeze, the ice cream wouldn’t freeze.

“I didn’t have the time to remake it because it was for my mom’s birthday. I ended up putting the ice cream in a cake tin and freezing it in the freezer instead of the ice cream maker. It didn’t get all the way frozen, but it took a shape. It still looked good, so it was okay!

“Sometimes with baking, it’s not a complete failure, and you need to improvise,” Gerhard added. “I try as much as I can to improvise and not throw everything away, but sometimes you just have to start over.”

Up next for Gerhard is this spring semester’s Senior Design project, and then a summer internship with Goldman Sachs as a technology analyst intern doing quantitative finance. Food-wise, she plans to start a food blog over the next few months. At this point, she has been showcasing beautiful pictures of her homemade creations on Instagram, but the public has to wait to access her signature recipes until her blog is up and running. In the meantime, she’s offered to share a couple of her recipes here to whet our appetites (see recipe cards in the sidebar).

Breen’s favorite subject growing up was math, and with her father’s career path as an example, she decided that she wanted to pursue engineering as well. Georgia Tech was a natural fit.

In the following interview, Breen – who serves on the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees – talks about how her psychology and ISyE degrees complement one another, the career path that led to her current role as executive director of both the Georgia Power Foundation, Inc. and the Southern Company Charitable Foundation, and how she uses her ISyE skills in this role.

You’ve said that you’ve always been interested in industrial engineering, but that the human side of implementation interested you as well, so you earned your first degree from Georgia Tech in applied psychology. What interests you about the human element of engineering?

In my first co-op job, the company was going through a reorganization. The productivity plummeted as employees faced uncertainty. This was a great lesson and inspired dozens of questions about how things could have been done differently to engage people. The ISyE curriculum had a couple of classes on organizational behavior and human-centered design; my desire to learn beyond that led me to the School of Psychology. 

You ultimately went on to earn your M.S. in industrial engineering from Tech. How do your two degrees complement one another? 

The degrees are a nice complement: Engineering helped me to develop a skillset of problem solving and critical thinking, while psychology taught me to understand and design for people. 

You are the executive director of both the Georgia Power Foundation, Inc. and the Southern Company Charitable Foundation. Describe your career path that eventually led to this role.

I have been very fortunate in my career with Georgia Power – two decades in customer experience, marketing, renewable energy, and now charitable giving. Georgia Power encourages employees to be an integral part of the community, and as I began to do work in the community, I loved it so much that I wanted to spend more time doing it. This interest developed over a decade ago, and I invested in learning about the nonprofit sector while I had other jobs – everything from fundraising for nonprofits to serving on boards and gala committees. The preparation and relationships I developed positioned me as a strong candidate when this role became available.

What makes you passionate and enthusiastic about working with the foundations? 

The passion is for community support across Georgia – helping nonprofits to address opportunities and needs in education, environment, human services, and the arts.

What is important about the relationship between the Georgia Power Foundation and Georgia Tech?

Education is a key focus area for both Georgia Power and the Georgia Power Foundation because it is one of the key drivers of the state’s future work force and economic success. The Foundation maintains partnerships with universities across the state, including Georgia Tech.

How do you use your ISyE skills in your current role?

My role is split between nonprofit engagement and business and team leadership. Like managing any other part of the business, this role entails being responsible for employees, budgets, analytics, technology utilization, and process management. Reducing bottlenecks, simplifying processes, and optimizing technology are all ISyE skills that get used on a regular basis.

You were recently named to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees. How do you plan to give back to Tech through this opportunity, and what are you looking forward to from the experience? 

This is my third year serving on the Georgia Tech Gold and White Honors Gala sponsorship committee, and I’ve enjoyed raising money for the Alumni Association. I am looking forward to opportunities to provide input into the Alumni Association’s strategic direction and to meeting students through programs like Dinner Jackets. 

What is your definition of success?

My professional definition of success is to be able to do the work I love and to make a positive impact on the lives of others. 

At the gala held on January 25, 2018, two alumni from the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering received awards: Carey Brown and Annie Walker.

Few alumni have given so much of themselves to Georgia Tech – both as a student and alumnus – as Carey Brown 9BIE 69). While at Tech, he served as president of the Student Government Association (SGA), the Ramblin’ Reck Club, ANAK Society, and Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, as well as chair of the Alexander-Tharpe Fund. After graduating, Brown participated on the ISyE Advisory and Georgia Tech Athletic Association boards, and served three, three-year terms as a board member of the Alumni Association.

He’s given back plenty to his community, too, by serving on the boards of the Tommy Nobis Center, Buckhead Rotary Club, Literacy Action, Georgia State Golf Association, and the Cherokee Art Endowment Trust, among others.

Brown and his wife, Sally, had three children: Natalie, who graduated from the College of Charleston, as well as Brent (IM 96), and Tyler (IM 01, HTS 01). During his service as a first lieutenant with the U.S. Army Airborne Rangers, Tyler was killed in action in Iraq in 2004. Like his father, Tyler was a student president of the SGA and they both received the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from the Alumni Association. Carey, Sally, and numerous Tech friends created an endowed scholarship in Tyler’s name, which is given each year to an outstanding graduate of the Woodward Academy who will attend Tech the succeeding fall.

Brown was honored with the Joseph Mayo Pettit Distinguished Service Award. This is the highest award conferred by the Alumni Association and honors alumni who have provided outstanding support of the Institute and the Alumni Association throughout a lifetime, while also providing leadership in their chosen professions and local communities.

Annie Walker is nothing less than a star at the world’s largest retailer. She joined Walmart in 2002 after “getting out” of Tech with a degree in industrial and systems engineering. She advanced rapidly within the company, graduating from the Walmart Leadership Academy and becoming a vice president at Walmart Stores in 2012. Since 2015, Walker has served as vice president of the retailer’s over-the-counter pharmaceutical and sales merchandising operations. In 2016 and 2017, she was named one of Mass Market Retailing’s “Most Influential Women.”

Despite moving a few states away, she’s remained actively involved with Georgia Tech and is a past president and treasurer of the Northwest Arkansas Alumni Club. Walker has also been a member of Tech’s ISyE Advisory Board and received Tech's Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award in 2017. Walker lives with her husband, Jacob, and two young children in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

She was honored with the Outstanding Young Alumni Award. This award is given to young Georgia Tech alumni – those who have not reached their 40th birthday by the date of the awards gala – who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and service to Tech, the Alumni Association, the community, and their profession.

Two other Tech faculty were included in the 2018 NAE class: Timothy Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute and professor and David S. Lewis Jr. Chair in the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering; and Gary Mary, current chancellor at University of California Davis and adjunct faculty member at Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In announcing Shi’s election to the prestigious organization, the NAE commended him “for development of data fusion-based quality methods and their implementation in multistage manufacturing systems.” Shi is an early pioneer in the development and application of data enabled manufacturing. His methodologies 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.

“This is amazing news and a well-deserved honor for Jan,” said Nagi Gebraeel, Georgia Power Early Career Professor and associate professor in ISyE. “His pioneering work in integrating quality data to control manufacturing systems has revolutionized automated multi-stage processes that are omnipresent in key industries like automotive manufacturing, steel casting processes, aircraft assembly, and many others. We are very proud of Jan's achievements, and it's an honor to be his colleague.”

“We all know Jan is a pioneer and leader in his field and an outstanding member of the Stewart School and Georgia Tech community,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair Edwin Romeijn. “I am very proud to have him as a colleague and friend, and I congratulate him on receiving this well-deserved and significant honor.”

“We are delighted that the National Academy of Engineering has recognized our Georgia Tech faculty members for their outstanding contributions to engineering and as leaders in their fields,” said Steve McLaughlin, dean of the College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “Jan’s induction is a testament to the quality of our faculty members and their contributions to the engineering profession.”

Shi received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1987, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992. He joined ISyE in 2005.

Upon hearing the news of his NAE election, Shi said, “It is a great honor indeed to be elected to the NAE.  I am very happy to be a member of the Stewart School, with its outstanding faculty and talented students, for the past 10 years. I am thankful to H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart for their generous support, which has enabled me to make many innovations happen.”

Shi and the other 82 newly elected members will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 2018.

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

Known for his work on The Honey Bee Algorithm, which tamed web traffic instabilities on servers by mimicking the behavior of bee colonies, systems researcher Craig Tovey has seen plenty of nature-inspired technological feats, but also foibles. He shared them in a talk on February 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.

In 2016, the bee-inspired algorithm garnered Tovey and his collaborators a Golden Goose Award, which commends curiosity-driven research as it blossoms to palpably benefit society. The Honey Bee Algorithm, for example, has saved significant web hosting costs.

“We lucked out with the bees and web hosting,” said Tovey, who hopes that along with practical takeaways on naturally inspired technology, his audience will also share in his own awe and affection for nature’s solutions.

When algorithms are eternal

“When you study swarming bees, you discover truths that are lasting. The algorithms that guide them evolved over millions of years, and will hopefully still be there for millions of years to come,” said Tovey, a co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design. “Compare that with when you design a new microcircuit. Three years later it’s gone, forever lost; replaced by new designs.”

Whether mimicking nature is prudent in a particular engineering job depends a lot on the problem to be solved. Often, it’s just better to use something off the shelf or adapt it.

“When the real-life problem is static and well-defined with predictable data, then the nature-inspired methods are usually much weaker, much worse than classical optimization methods,” Tovey said. 

When boring is better

The “Traveling Salesman Problem” is a typical example. A researcher tries to compute the best pathways a proverbial salesperson should travel, and in which order, to visit hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of proverbial cities on a map.

The goal is to travel the shortest possible total distance.

“Nature-inspired approaches will find good solutions for 100 or so cities, but not optimal ones,” said Tovey, who is also a professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “By contrast, the top researchers can solve 20,000 or 50,000 locations optimally with a classical algorithm, and do it really quickly.”

When ants miss and hit 

“People have imitated ants to find the optimal pathways through a static system, and when you compare that method with classical optimization methods, then the classical methods are about 10 billion times better.”

But life is fickle, which can make it a great teacher in science and engineering. “Every living creature is very good at solving a number of different problems, otherwise it would have gone extinct,” Tovey said.

Toss unpredictability into an engineering problem, and natural algorithms that direct the movements of ants or bees can be better equipped to cope than classical solutions.

“In the Traveling Salesman Problem, the cities don’t move around. But when you’re chasing a moving target, and your data isn’t perfectly complete, then you can have great success by imitating insect swarms. You can get real-time control on data that’s quite literally on the fly,” Tovey said. 

When bees know best

That counts for a lot in a pinch. When a hurricane looms, people check their weather apps much more frequently as the tempest encroaches. When markets tank, people sell off stocks, and data surges in and out of financial servers.

“If the patterns of user demand on the web never changed, and the requests to a server always stayed the same, all would be well without imitating honeybees,” Tovey said. “But that notion is ridiculous, as we all know.”

“Bees have evolved to deal with flower patches that have changing characteristics. A patch that is great to visit at 10 o’clock in the morning may have its flowers closed-up at one o’clock in the afternoon, or it may be raining.”

Algorithms steering bee behavior make the insect swarms adjust to supply and demand fluxes similar to those that confront a web server. The honeybees handed Tovey and his fellow researchers valuable insights for their web hosting algorithm. 

When slime flops but amazes

Though classic algorithms beat nature in simple situations, watching natural algorithms in even the simplest organisms can be awe-inspiring. Take slime mold, a non-cellular organism related to amoebas.

“If you put down lumps of food near it, the slime mold will extend to reach the lumps and connect them with each other.”

The mold makes very efficient connections that adapt well to differing constellations of food dabs.

“Some researchers placed food sources in spots corresponding to the locations of cities in Japan that were connected by rail lines, and sure enough, the slime mold eventually settled on a configuration connecting the spots that nearly perfectly matched the rail network that actually connected the cities,” Tovey said.

Again here, classic algorithms do the job better, but still, that slime is just amazing.

For all his awe of bees, Tovey has had to avoid making their acquaintance in person and leave the bee-handling to his collaborators. “I and my whole family are all extremely allergic to bee stings,” Tovey said. “We keep EpiPens around the house.”

The Honey Bee Algorithm team that received the 2016 Golden Goose was comprised of: Tovey, John Hagood Vande Vate, John Bartholdi III, and Sunil Nakrani of Georgia Tech, and Thomas Seeley of Cornell University. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

Wani’s family comes from the territory of Kashmir – the disputed region between India and Pakistan – and he explained that after the British Partition in 1947, Kashmiris were promised the chance to vote on which country they would join. To this day they have not received that opportunity. “Public service is the idea of participation in government, the idea that we have the right of self-determination, the idea of civic engagement -- that was engrained in me at a very young age,” Wani noted. “Some of my family were involved in Kashmiri politics. Learning about the struggle itself really fostered my interest in civics, government, and public participation.”

Even before arriving at Tech, Wani had looked at public service programs offered by the Institute and felt drawn to the Federal Jackets Fellowship program. Once at Tech, Wani joined business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi, where he met ISyE senior Lois Johnson, who had interned as a Federal Jacket at the White House operations office in fall 2016. Johnson encouraged Wani to apply for the program, and she was able to advise him on how prepare for the essay writing and interviews that are part of the selection process.

Ultimately, Wani applied for and was selected for a Federal Jackets Fellowship, the stipend of which allowed him to take an unpaid internship with the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (CSST) during the fall 2017 semester. This committee, Wani explained, has jurisdiction over federal science research programs at agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and even NASA. “That really appealed to me, having an engineering background and getting to work with other engineers and scientists – Ph.D.s and experts in these fields,” Wani said. “I thought it would be the best way to bring Georgia Tech to the Hill, but also to bring the Hill back to Georgia Tech: fostering that symbiotic relationship.” 

When the House was in session, Wani spent much of his time in committee hearings – about two each week – on topics that ranged from quantum technology to geo engineering to the cybersecurity of the U.S. electrical grid. He helped write policy memos for CSST committee members, so they could prepare in advance for the expert speakers brought in to give testimony and he wrote opening statements for Congressional members that went into the record of the hearings. Knowing that something he wrote is now part of the permanent Congressional record is Wani’s proudest accomplishment from his internship.

Although Wani worked on the Democratic side of the CSST, there were, he said, “plenty of bipartisan issues or policies.” These included the U.S. and Israel Space Cooperation Act and the Women and Minorities in STEM Booster Act of 2017.

Unsurprisingly, Russian interference in the 2016 election was the hot topic when Wani was at the Capitol. He attended several meetings of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe – also known as the Helsinki Commission – where he learned more about what Russia is doing to further its own political goals. The CSST had its own committee meeting about the Russian-backed Kaspersky antivirus software, which had been used by the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Homeland Security (DHS). Kaspersky has been used by the Russian government to hack American data, and ultimately, the software was banned by the DoD and DHS. “That was definitely my most memorable experience,” Wani commented.

When asked what he took away from his internship, Wani paused. “I think a long-term sense of optimism,” he said after a moment. “Now I really understand the importance of compromise – you’re not always going to get what you want, but you can still work together. Understanding that both parties want the world to be a better place gives me optimism.

“And in day-to-day politics, we lose sight of the fact that our institutions are greater than we often acknowledge them to be,” he added. “For example, I was able to tour the Capitol a few times, and there’s a place where there’s a star on the tile, which marks where Abraham Lincoln’s desk stood when he was a member of Congress. Standing where Abraham Lincoln stood – that was really cool. Walking by the Supreme Court everyday on the way to work or going to Arlington National Cemetery or to the monuments blew my mind. It reminded me that whatever you may think of politics, these institutions have been here before us and hopefully will last after us.

“I was in constant awe of where I was.”

For more information on the Federal Jackets internship program, visit http://www.gov.gatech.edu/internships/dc.

Machine learning has been around for decades, but the advent of big data and more powerful computers has increased its impact significantly — ­moving machine learning beyond pattern recognition and natural language processing into a broad array of scientific disciplines.

A subcategory of artificial intelligence, machine learning deals with the construction of algorithms that enable computers to learn from and react to data rather than following explicitly programmed instructions. “Machine-learning algorithms build a model based on inputs and then use that model to make other hypotheses, predictions, or decisions,” explained Irfan Essa, professor and associate dean in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing who also directs the Institute’s Center for Machine Learning.

Established in June 2016, the Center for Machine Learning is comprised of researchers from six colleges and 13 schools at Georgia Tech — a number that keeps growing. “Among our goals is to better coordinate research efforts across campus, serve as a home for machine learning leaders, and train the next generation of leaders,” Essa said, referring to Georgia Tech’s new Ph.D. program in machine learning.

Within the center, researchers are striving to advance both basic and applied science. “For example, one foundational goal is to really understand deep learning at its core,” Essa said. “We want to develop new theories and innovative algorithms, rather than just using deep learning as a black box for inputs and outputs.” And on the applied research front, the center has seven focal areas: health care, education, logistics, social networks, the financial sector, information security, and robotics.

See the complete article from Research Horizons magazine.

“We are delighted that the Stewart School has once again been acknowledged as the top program of its kind – a leader among peer institutions around the country.” said Edwin Romeijn, H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair. “ISyE remains at the vanguard of the field as a result of the hard work of our outstanding faculty, exceptional students, dedicated staff, and engaged alumni.”

Tech’s College of Engineering is ranked eighth nationally (no. 4 among public universities), and all engineering programs placed in the top 10. Eight of the 11 programs are ranked in the top five, showcasing the College’s overall strength in individual disciplines

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

“Andy has made valuable contributions both to the Stewart School and to his field through his research on optimization and stochastic modeling, particularly with applications in electric energy systems and electricity markets,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “His appointment to the Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship will enable him to advance his career and further his work in this field.”

In addition to his research in optimization and stochastic modeling, Sun also works on theory and algorithms for robust and stochastic optimization, and large-scale nonconvex optimization.

“It is a great honor to be appointed to the Anderson-Interface Early Career Professorship,” said Sun. “ISyE has a long tradition of bringing cutting-edge operations research methodology to solving complex engineering problems.

“Specifically for my research, I – with my collaborators and students – have been working on modernizing the operation systems of electric energy systems, particularly in terms of developing new optimization methods, stochastic modeling approaches, and algorithms for electric power systems operations; maintenance; renewable integration; improving system stability; and utilizing demand response resources.”

“The Anderson-Interface professorship is both a recognition of this body of work and also an encouragement for me to press forward,” Sun added.

Sun's doctoral thesis won the second prize of the 2011 INFORMS George B. Dantzig Award, given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. His paper, “Adaptive Robust Optimization for Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problem” has been highly cited and helped form a new area of research of optimization under uncertainty in electric power system. Sun’s research has also won several paper awards, among which, “Multistage Adaptive Robust Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem” won the first prize of the 2017 INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment Section Best Paper in Energy Award. “An Adaptive Optimization-based Load Shedding Scheme in Microgrids” received the Best Paper Award at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2018. He has had numerous papers published in flagship journals in both power systems and operations research, such as IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming. Most recently, Sun was awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for “Data-driven Dynamic Adaptive Optimization for Next Generation Power System Operation.”

In 2011, he received a Ph.D. in operations research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University. Before joining the Stewart School, Sun spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

“Kamran’s significant contributions to Stewart School and to the areas of statistical modeling and machine learning, particularly focusing on the analysis of high-dimensional streaming data for system monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis, are reflected in his appointment to the Fouts Family Early Career Professorship,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “This appointment will provide Kamran with opportunities to enhance his career and further his research, which includes developing methodologies for a variety of applications ranging from manufacturing to health care.”

Paynabar’s research interests comprise both applied and theoretical aspects of data mining and statistical modeling integrated with engineering knowledge.

“I am honored to receive the Fouts Family Early Career Professorship, and thank the Fouts for their generous and continuous support of ISyE and early career faculty,” said Paynabar. “The Fouts Family Early Career Professorship will considerably help continue my research program and explore new research and education areas.”

Paynabar is the recipient of the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award, the Best Application Paper Award from IISE Transactions, POMS Best Paper Award, INFORMS QSR Best Paper Award, and the Wilson Prize for the Best Student Paper in Manufacturing.

He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in industrial engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology and Azad University in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012. He also holds an M.A. in statistics from the University of Michigan.

Having served as student body president in high school and on executive boards of leading organizations like India Club at Georgia Tech and Presidents’ Council Governing Board, Agrawal wanted to get out of his comfort zone and kick-start a new initiative on Tech’s campus. Recipient of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers’ 2018 Excellence in Leadership Award, in the following interview, Agrawal discusses his passion for supply chain, and how, in January 2017, he founded Tech’s premier supply chain organization: APICS at Georgia Tech.

Your ISyE concentration is supply chain. How did that particular field come to pique your interest?

I love thinking about product lifecycles. For example, I am an avid consumer of Blue Donkey Coffee, and I am curious to know how those coffee beans in Brazil translate into the cold-brew coffee in my hand. Every product has some sort of supply chain, and figuring out how different processes gel together to deliver the final product interests me.

Does your interest in supply chain have a particular focus?

My overarching interest is on the project/product management side. While interning at Cummins in Indiana last summer, I worked on their supply chain capability team to help change their strategy from site deployments to functional deployments for implementing ERP tools for regional warehousing and sourcing of diesel engines. The most enriching part of the experience was the ability to interface with different teams globally like the deployment team, the testing and quality team, the data management team, the sourcing team, and so forth to make the end-to-end process robust.

With project management, you don’t have to pigeonhole yourself into one role. You’re working with different teams to make the product more efficient – and thus more valuable in the marketplace.

You founded the student chapter of APICS at Tech a little over a year ago. What motivated you to do this?

For the last 23 years, Georgia Tech’s ISyE program has been the best industrial engineering program in the world. Arguably, one of the most important branches of ISyE is supply chain. I realized there wasn’t a group on campus that was propagating this interest among students. Additionally, I I wanted to expose students to supply chain early in their college career. Hence, I had an urge to start an initiative where we breathe and bleed supply chain. APICS at Georgia Tech is the result of that.

Why APICS? I realized that APICS is the No.1 certifier for supply chain across the U.S. I approached Supply Chain & Logistics (SCL) director Timothy Brown, and he mentioned that APICS is the executive sponsor for Supply Chain Day. I realized that there was no better time to ask APICS to support a student chapter at Tech.

With more than 75 members and a reach of over 1500 people on campus in just a year, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience to start this club. And we now have a strong brand to grow APICS rapidly in years to come.

What sorts of activities does APICS at Georgia Tech engage in?

To put it briefly, we engage in anything supply chain-related on campus from mentorship to professional development initiatives. We started off by hosting an alumni networking night, where we invited ISyE alums across all concentrations to share with students about how their ISyE education aids them in their respective careers. We partnered with SCL to manage logistics for Supply Chain Days each semester. We hosted one of GT’s first-ever program management nights, where we brought in representatives from companies like Ernst & Young, Microsoft, and HD Supply to talk to students about how project management differs across industries and to engage our participants in live case studies. We have additionally connected with APICS Atlanta to do talks for our members on what’s hot in supply chain today.

What are your goals for APICS in 2018, especially since this is your last year at Tech?

Realizing that the brand of APICS at Georgia Tech is growing rapidly, one of my biggest goals is to push the new executive board to think about how we can provide more niche supply chain-related events to boost membership. For example, one idea is to partner with HackGT or a consulting firm to either do a supply chain-related hackathon or a case competition.

I will be serving in an advisory fashion this year, and I am excited to see how the new leadership team will scale the organization.

What are some lessons you’ve learned from starting a new student organization at Georgia Tech?

The biggest lesson I have learnt from starting this organization is to think big and to not be afraid to take risks. There were times during the year when we got creative and hosted a couple membership nights and had just four or five people show up. Each failure motivated us to keep trying harder, and instilled in us the spirit of never giving up.

Secondly, I learned that it’s not so much about the events we plan; rather, it’s about the people we work with and the people we serve. One of the most meaningful instances was when one of the executive board members told me that being a part of APICS was the reason he got his first co-op at Johnson & Johnson. Being able to create more leaders and helping others fulfill their dreams has been one of the biggest takeaways for me as president.   

Looking back, I can say this was by far the best decision I’ve made in college. I came from 8,000 miles away to attend Georgia Tech, and I wanted to make a strong impact on campus. And APICS at Georgia Tech has been the perfect platform for me to do that.

“Congratulations to Turgay on this career achievement,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “This promotion to associate professor reflects Turgay’s outstanding accomplishments in the area of health care analytics, including medical decision making, health care operations, and health policy.”

About Turgay Ayer

In addition to being the George Family Foundation Early Career Professor at ISyE, Ayer is the research director for medical decision-making in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. Ayer also has a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

Ayer serves as an associate editor for Operations Research, and he is a past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. His research focuses on health care analytics, with applications in predictive health, medical decision making, health care operations, and health policy. His research papers have been published in top-tier engineering, management, and medical journals, and covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, and NPR.

He has received several awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award (2015), the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) Lee Lusted Award (2009), first place in the MSOM Best Practice-based Research Competition (2017), and placed as a finalist in the 2017 INFORMS Franz Edelman Competition.

Ayer received a B.S. (2006) in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. (2011) degrees in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Since Errika Moore (BSIE 96) was in high school, she has followed the mantra “making an impact, making a difference.” Throughout her distinguished career, Moore has remained engaged with Georgia Tech through several boards, as well as the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, providing volunteer leadership and service while abiding by her personal philosophy.

In this interview, Moore discusses her particular passion for supporting female and minority participation in STEM fields, why she made the career move from corporate to nonprofit work, and how she continues to give back to Georgia Tech and ISyE — including serving on the ISyE Advisory Board — in what she calls “a lifestyle of servant leadership.”

You contribute considerable time to organizations in support of increasing minority participation in STEM-related fields. When did your passion for this begin, and how has it developed along with your career?

It actually began when I was at Tech. [In the early 1990s] women made up 10 percent of the student body. That’s in comparison with the 40 percent female population today. In addition, in my time at Tech, minorities represented about 10 percent of the student population.

As a result, I wanted to ensure that others could either have the same opportunities — or ideally, opportunities with even greater access. It became a personal passion that whenever I could specifically be involved with an organization that would increase access for women and minorities — such as my being president of the Georgia Tech Black Alumni Organization or serving on the board of the Georgia Tech Women Alumnae Network — I would raise my hand and join in.

For women in technology, there’s been a significant decline in the number of women graduating in STEM fields since the 1970s. And when you look at the upcoming job opportunities — by 2022, there will be 1.2 million tech-sector jobs — I want women and minorities to fill those jobs.

Previously you were the vice president of member services & external affairs at IT Senior Management Forum (ITSMF), a nonprofit organization that promotes African American representation in senior technology positions within Fortune 500 organizations. Currently, you’re the executive director for the Technology Association of Georgia Education Collaborative (TAG-Ed). Describe what you've done in these roles.

I opted to come out of corporate to specifically focus my energy on nonprofits, hoping to make a difference and be an advocate. At ITSMF my responsibilities included everything from identifying to recruiting to supporting black technology executives.

Who was an influential ISyE professor for you?

Augustine Esogbue, who is now professor emeritus. He was the first black professor at Tech and was like a surrogate father to me. Today he continues to be one of my greatest champions, confidants, and supporters.

He was also an advisor for the GTSBE, which was one of the first chapters of NSBE. He went on to influence hundreds of lives by serving as an advisor for the national organization.

In fall 2016 you received the Woman of the Year award from Women in Technology (WIT). What did winning this award mean to you?

To say it’s a huge and humbling honor is honestly an understatement. WIT is an organization that is highly committed to empowering women in every stage of life — from young women in high school and college to seasoned professionals.

My other mantra in my life is “to whom much is given, much is required.” So the Woman of the Year Award was not only a phenomenal recognition, but it was also a phenomenal responsibility to both uphold receiving the recognition and to ensure I’m doing something positive for the women I come in contact with through that recognition.

Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years? What would you like to be doing?

I have decided to stay committed to the nonprofit sector. There’s a saying that “only a life lived in the service to others is worth living,” so I’ve decided that’s the space for me. I’m fulfilling the purpose that was given to me 20 years ago. Now, how I will continue to serve in that capacity — that may be the question mark. As long as I can be an advocate and a champion, that’s what’s most fulfilling for me, from a career perspective and from a volunteer leadership capacity.

I also give thanks for having the opportunity to serve on the ISyE Advisory Board. [Former School Chair and Professor Emerita] Jane Ammons asked me to serve on the board, and coming from her, it was quite the honor to be asked. And the honor continued by serving under current School Chair Edwin Romeijn’s leadership as well. Being asked to serve and represent the department that shaped who I have become has been one of the most fulfilling opportunities I’ve had while serving Tech.

Jim McClelland (BSIE 66) has spent a lifetime devoted to helping others both professionally and personally. Describing why public service is so important to him, McClelland said, “That was just the value system I grew up with.”

McClelland served as the president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana for 41 years prior to assuming his current role as Indiana’s executive director for drug prevention, treatment, and enforcement. He also has remained involved in the life of his alma mater via volunteer leadership and service through appointments on the ISyE Advisory Board and the Georgia Tech Grand Challenges Advisory Board.

McClelland graduated from Georgia Tech during the Vietnam War and served a three-year military tour of duty. His last assignment was in Washington, D.C., and during his free time he volunteered as a tutor for a church-based program that served children in low-income neighborhoods. The church also had a Saturday program for children with disabilities, and McClelland volunteered to transport the kids participating in the program.

“I got more satisfaction out of those volunteer experiences than anything I had done up to that point,” McClelland reflected. “I started wondering if there was a place where I could use my IE skills in a paid position and get a similar kind of satisfaction. So I started calling nonprofit organizations headquartered in D.C., and the one that really expressed interest in me was Goodwill Industries.”

After going through an executive training program and running a Goodwill organization in Texas, McClelland was recruited to Indianapolis, Indiana, to serve as vice president of operations for Goodwill of Central Indiana. In less than a year, he was promoted to president and CEO, and he spent the next four decades helping to transform lives through the organization.

“It turned out to be an incredible experience,” McClelland said. “We had the freedom to try lots of ways to grow our businesses and accomplish our mission. As importantly, we had a board that gave us the freedom to fail at some of what we tried and learn and grow from the experiences.”

Under McClelland's leadership, Goodwill of Central Indiana grew to over 3,200 employees with an annual revenue of more than $130 million.

McClelland and his team began examining the links between poverty, low education levels, crime rates, births to young unwed mothers, and a myriad of health issues. They found “an enormous amount of data showing how these issues are all interrelated; they reinforce and compound each other,” McClelland said.

“And yet, as a society, we don’t tend to treat these issues as if they’re related. The public sector tends to operate in silos, while the not-for-profit sector is incredibly fragmented. Neither sector is structured to deal effectively with complex social problems. A lot of organizations are very good at dealing with a piece of a much larger issue, but we’ve done a lousy job of connecting the pieces. So we began exploring how we could bring someof the pieces together for much greater long-term impact.”

Historically, hockey has lagged behind other sports when it comes to data analysis. Baseball, and more recently, basketball, have long taken advantage of metrics and advanced algorithms to gain an edge over the competition, especially during the draft or in the analysis of players during free agency. Hockey has just begun to harness the vast amount of data coming off the ice, and Mandrycky is one of a handful of rising stars developing data analytics programs for NHL teams.

Mandrycky works with the Wild as a hockey operations analyst gathering and analyzing data for management, coaches and scouts to help them make better, more informed decisions. Mandrycky’s job has three components. First, she gathers data, including goals, shots, hits and faceoffs, creating a data set to pull from. She is instrumental in consolidating all the data into a single source in order to easily run queries. Second, she takes that data and analyzes it. From the analysis, management makes decisions about who to trade, how much someone should be compensated, draft rankings, coaching strategies, player usage, and more.

“It’s the analysis component that draws on much of what I learned at Tech,” said Mandrycky. “Engineering principles like optimization and machine learning come in to play on a daily basis.”

In the ISyE program at Tech, students are required to take a database systems class, which has been useful for Mandrycky when setting up the data warehouse for the Wild. But what has truly helped her excel are the principles of analysis learned at Tech, allowing her to compare players, develop rankings for upcoming drafts, and analyze coaching and team patterns. 

The third part of Mandrycky’s job is presenting her findings to management, mostly in the form of graphical reports. She has parameters in place to generate automated reports that create data visualizations for management and coaching staff to review and easily synthesize the information. It’s Mandrycky’s job to set up the system so staff can get answers to their questions very quickly. She will sometimes get a text or phone call at 10 p.m. asking for information about a certain player, and, thanks to her system, she can answer with just a few clicks of the mouse. 

“If the general manager gets a phone call and a player is available for trade, you don’t have a lot of time to think and react,” said Mandrycky. “That’s why it’s critical to have the infrastructure set up to already have analysis at hand, so we can feel comfortable and confident making decisions.”

Mandrycky has been in her role now for over a year. She’s much more comfortable offering her opinion on matters, and feels confident in the processes she’s put in place to mine relevant information.

“If we are talking about a trade, I’m involved in those discussions,” said Mandrycky. “Or we could be analyzing a free agent. I have an opinion on these topics that management wants to hear. I have a seat at the table, which is great.”

The fact that she has a seat at the table is a bigger accomplishment than Mandrycky lets on. The hockey business is dominated by men, most of whom played the game to at least the college or minor league level. As far as she knows, Mandrycky is the only woman in a front office job in the NHL who has an influence on the on-ice product. The rest work in media relations, marketing or administrative roles. Being in the engineering field prepared her to be in an environment historically dominated by men, so she doesn’t let gender stereotypes get in her way.

“I’ve always felt that being female was an advantage,” said Mandrycky. “When you're the only person at the table that looks like you, whether that is gender or race, it means you have a different viewpoint or a different way to approach problems. I try to use it to my advantage.”

Her advice to other women looking to get into engineering or sports is to not be discouraged by being the only woman in the room. She says women should think of it as an opportunity and consider how they can do the job better than men. Mandrycky’s competitive spirit has helped her along the way as well.

“You have to advocate for yourself so you don’t get penned into gender stereotypes,” said Mandrycky. “As a female, you can’t wait for someone to open an opportunity up for you. You have to make one for yourself.”

Mandrycky argues that women have many of the skills necessary to work in pro sports, from time management, to organization, to effectively communication – all strengths that she possesses that have enabled her to thrive in her role. The soft skills are just as important as the analytics and engineering skills, she concludes.

“I always say the most important part of my job is to make people want to listen to me,” said Mandrycky.

Mandrycky owes some of her confidence to the mentorship from Alisha Waller, a Tech lecturer in ISyE. Waller spoke very frankly to Mandrycky about the challenges of being a woman in the business world, as well as the balancing act of having a family.

“Dr. Waller encouraged me to pursue whatever I wanted,” said Mandrycky. “After I was introduced to the world of hockey, I just went after it. The best way to do something is to just do it. Hockey is even further behind the curve when it comes to inclusion of women, but it’s my passion. Hopefully, I’m paving the way for other women to come.”

Mandrycky plans to continue her career in hockey, and hopefully one day become an assistant general manager. She would like to be the person calling the shots for the team. Until then, she’s making a difference with her analysis and giving the Wild a competitive edge. 

“Panama has been ‘global’ for longer than we’ve been calling things ‘global,’" said Clark, co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (GT-RNOC) and senior research scientist in the School of Computer Science. "Because of its strategic location, it’s been a business and cultural crossroads for the world for more than a century. This history, combined with Panama’s continued outsized importance in global transportation and business, results in rich cultural diversity and interesting opportunities to work on projects with global impact.”

The seven-week program will run May 9 through June 30. While it’s open to students from all majors, the two courses offered for the program’s inaugural year are CS 4400 Databases and CS 4261 Mobile Applications and Services, which are especially well-suited for computer science and industrial engineering students. Creating additional study abroad options for these students was one of the motivations for starting the program, according to Clark. Another was the opportunity to continue working with the Georgia Tech Logistics Innovation & Research Center in Panama. This connection “provides a unique chance for CS and ISyE students to learn through working on real-world problems in a location that is a global hub for companies and people doing work in supply chain and logistics,” he said.

Courses offered through the program will encourage cross-cultural experiences and incorporate the local surroundings. Students will collaborate with innovators, researchers, students, and educators from the Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center, and Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (UTP), the leading engineering research institution in the country. They'll also take field trips to locations like the Panama Canal and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute that offer learning and cultural opportunities unique to the area.

Students will live and study in Ciudad del Saber (City of Knowledge), a former U.S. military base located in the suburbs of Panama City, which the Panamanian government converted into an independently-run center of learning and innovation.

“Ciudad del Saber is a lot like the environment we’re cultivating at Tech Square,” explained Jennifer Mullins, GT-RNOC programs manager and coordinator of the Panama Summer Program. “It’s designed to encourage startups, and to be a hub for innovation, education, and research.”

"The Georgia Tech Panama Summer Program offers students a valuable opportunity for enhancing their technical skills and expanding their cultural horizons," said Jorge E. Barnett Lawton, interim managing director, Georgia Tech Panama Logistics Innovation & Research Center. "As a global logistics hub and a home base for a large number of global firms, Panama offers a blooming business environment, a growing innovation community, and a perfect setting for this type of program where collaboration and creativity can truly thrive."

In their downtime, a five-minute walk will take students to La Plaza, where they’ll find restaurants, a bank, dry cleaners, bookstore, art gallery, and other services and amenities.

The application deadline for the Panama Summer Program is February 1. To learn more, visit the GT-RNOC or Office of International Education websites, or contact Russ Clark or Jennifer Mullins.