On May 12, 2013, the College of Engineering celebrated the graduating class of Spring 2013 with a commencement ceremony at College Park Center. The Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Department graduated many students, including six doctoral, twenty-one master’s, and twenty-seven undergraduates. Listed below are the names of the IMSE students who graduated in the Spring 2013. These names were published in the UT Arlington Shorthorn newspaper:

Ph.D in  Industrial Engineering:

• Maurice Dwayne Cavitt, Dissertation Title: An Optimal Decision Model for Multi-System Process Capability Improvements Through a Personnel Environment and Integration (PEI) Framework Utilizing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technologies
• Shernette R. Kydd, Dissertation Title: The Characterization of Texas Healthcare Facilities Impacted by the 2012 Medicare Penalties: A Framework for Self Evaluation and Systemic Preemptive Action to Reduce Hospital Readmission Rates
• Ida Lumintu, Dissertation Title: RFID and RTLS Enhancement for Retained Surgical Instruments in the Body
• Diana Luisa Martinez Cepeda, Dissertation Title: Variants of Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines: Convex vs. Non-Convex, Piecewise-Linear vs. Smooth and Sequential Algorithms
• Nadia Maria Martinez Cepeda, Dissertation Title: Global Optimization of Nonconvex Piecewise Linear Regression Splines
• Restu Purwaningtyas Sunarto Bussey, Dissertation Title: Evaluation of Quality and Sustainability Incentives to Optimize the Indonesian to the United States Crude Oil Supply Chain

Master of Science in Engineering Management:

• Sanjay Bhansali
• Jonathan Burch
• Prabhu Muthanna Gummatira
• Yi-Pin Lee
• Angela Chidinma Nnadili
• Daniel Snigier
• Manasa Tekumalla
• Rishitha Yarabolu

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering:

• Majid Ahmadi
• Rohan Harshil Annamraju
• Soham Sudhir Bothare
• Hamid Ghoraishi
• Chendur Murugananthan Anand
• Japhet Ong
• Ajinkya Rao
• Archit Harshadkumar Sanghvi
• Jainil Surti
• Md Nafeez Tanim
• Efrain Vega

Master of Science in Logistics:

• Charles Kilgore
• Chenhao Mao

Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering:

• Ahmad “Adam” I. Achkantana
• Christian Eduardo Alvarez
• Daniel Appiah
• Narongrit Boonthunyaluk
• Luke Brigmon
• Erin Michelle Celone
• Ernesto Delgado
• Mildred Guadalupe Godinez-Pecina
• Carlos Miguel Guajardo
• Christopher J. James
• Holly Elizabeth Lane
• Paul V. Lexington
• David Michael Miller
• Victor Munoz
• Rhea J. Pak
• Mannaneel Harim Pankaj
• Kelsey A. Robinson
• Juan C. Robles
• Jairo Romero
• Nader Sayadi
• Mohammed A. Siddiqui
• Ronald Bryant Slovacek
• Adrian J. Sobalvarro
• Carolina Soto
• Conner H. Tynes
• Chidebe S. Ugoji
• Emanuel L. William.

Congratulations to all our Spring 2013 graduates!

A recap of the graduation ceremony can be found on the College of Engineering website.

Video of there graduation ceremony can be found on the UT Arlington website.

On May 2, 2013, the IMSE Department celebrated the inaugural Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Banquet by honoring graduating seniors, award winners, and scholarship recipients. Attendees included our Advisory Board members, former and current faculty members, as well as our current and former students and their families. The gala began with a reception and delicious catered dinner inside the San Saba Room at the University Center. Jim Crites, Executive Vice President for the Operations Division of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, presented the keynote address to graduating seniors. His speech urged the soon-to-be graduates to use their IE degrees to help find solutions to real-world problems. As he stated, only IEs have the gift that can be utilized to find efficiency while optimizing profit margins, citing numerous problems that industrial engineers have resolved in the airport industry. Crites explained how skills gained from an IE degree can solve real-world problems because IE are trained to think on a multi-dimensional level.

Following the keynote address, Interim Chair Dr. Tory Chen presented the endowed scholarship winners. The first scholarship awarded was the G.T. Stevens, Jr. Endowed Alumni Scholarship, which was established in 1998 to honor our Chair Emeritus. The award is given to outstanding Industrial Engineering students. This year’s recipients were Senior Luke Brigmon and Junior Anna Mai.

The next award, the Elinor Pape Endowed Scholarship, was established in 2006 to honor Dr. Pape’s service and dedication at UT Arlington as a member of the IE faculty. The Professor Emeritus was on-hand to present the scholarship to award winners Holly Lane, a senior, and Angel Decena-Guzman, a junior.

The final two scholarships that were presented were established by alumnus Keith Weiss. This year’s awardee for the Keith and Carolyn Weiss Industrial Engineering Scholarship was Harrison Armstrong. The Weiss Family Endowed Scholarship in Industrial Engineering was awarded to Ashvin Thomas.

After the scholarships were presented, Dr. Jamie Rogers presented the Industrial Engineers Outstanding Student Awards to Outstanding Senior, Adam Achkantana, and Outstanding Junior, Walter Joseph Multhur.

The last IE award presented was The Texas Industrial Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award which was created in alliance between Industrial Engineering departments at public universities that include UT Arlington, UT El Paso, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, and Lamar University. These universities select awardees based on the impact of their career on society. This year’s winner was alumnus, Mr. George Pickett, for his long career as an IE and his innovations in the founding of Atlantic Southeast Airlines which was acquired by Delta Airlines in 1999 and survives today as ExpressJet,  the world’s largest regional airline carrier.

Finally, the evening was capped with a big surprise as Dr. Jamie Rogers honored Dr. Don Liles with a plaque for excellence in service for more than three decades as a faculty in the IMSE department. All the attendees gave him a well-deserved standing ovation as he received his award.  Dr. Liles served as Chair of the department from 1998 to 2012 and remains at the university as Professor and Academic Advisor for the Engineering Management and Systems Engineering programs.

The event was a wonderful success as the IMSE Department got to honor their graduating seniors and award winners for the first of what will hopefully become an annual event.

Check our Facebook page in the coming days for photos of the event!

The Board of Directors at the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has elected Dr. Jamie Rogers for president. ABET is a “nonprofit, non-governmental organization that accredits college and university programs in the disciplines of applied science, computing, engineering, and engineering technology.” ABET accreditation assures that the university’s program meets the standards of quality established by the profession in the various fields of study. The IMSE Department is ABET accredited.

Dr. Rogers has been active in ABET, serving on he Board of Directors, International Activities Council, and Engineering Accreditation Commission. In addition to her election, she has been nominated for IIE Fellow and the prestigious Piper Professor Award. In 2011, she was inducted into the UTA Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She also received the UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teacher Award in recognition of her teaching excellence in 2012.

Dr. Jamie Rogers is a professor and the Associate Chair of the IMSE Department at UT Arlington.  She  also serves as the faculty advisor for the industrial engineering professional student organization, IIE.

Read the official announcement of Dr. Rogers’s election on the ABET website.

This year is off to a great start for Dr. Jamie Rogers – in addition to becoming  Full Professor, she has just been elected ABET President-Elect (www.abet.org). In addition, she has been nominated for IIE Fellow and the prestigious Piper Professor Award. Very exciting – stay tuned!

Here are the newly elected 2013-2013 IIE Officers:

From left to right,
Dr. Jamie Rogers, Kristopher Leonhardt (Historian), Ting Xiao (Secretary), Dylan Slick (Treasurer), Rachel Machbitz (Webmaster), Walter Mulflur (President), Caitlin Webb (Vice President), Vanessa Duran (Senior Chapter Liaison), and Marco Torres (Outreach).

Congratulations to these newly elected officers. We hope to have another great year for IIE!

A recent article in The Shorthorn cited a study from Georgetown University which claimed that degrees in healthcare were among the top college degrees to have due to the low unemployment rates in that field. It’s no wonder that healthcare is a growing field. With our aging society and the Affordable Care Act in place, more Americans will be seeking medical care in the near future.

So, what does a job in healthcare have to do with a blog about industrial engineering? As an industrial engineer, you can seek employment in a variety of industries, businesses, or institutions, including areas such as manufacturing, retail, banking, government, and healthcare. As the healthcare field grows, hospitals and other healthcare-related businesses will be seeking ways to optimize the efficiency of their workplaces. As an industrial engineer, your skills can be utilized to design systems that will merge people, information, materials, and equipment to provide the most efficient, productive, and safest methods. Industrial engineering has been called the people-oriented engineering profession. What better way is there than to apply your skills to the healthcare industry to better the lives of the doctors, nurses, staff, and patients?

In fact, the IMSE department’s Center on Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) is currently working on several projects in the healthcare field such as nurse planning, nurse triage services, adaptive pain management, and biomaterial fabrication. The healthcare industry is just one of the many areas that utilize the versatile skills of industrial engineers.

My name is Nadia Martinez and I am an international student at the University of Texas at Arlington. I came to the United States on January 2007 to enrich my education by accomplishing a master’s degree and pursuing a doctorate degree program. I obtained my master’s degree in fall 2008 and am currently working on my Ph.D. at the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department.

I belong to the Center On Stochastic, Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics (COSMOS) where the main objective is to design and model complex real-world systems. My research is focused on developing a deterministic global optimization method based on mixed integer linear programming to solve a piecewise linear function generated by a flexible statistical model subject to constraints that include both linear regression models and piecewise linear models. One of the main applications of this method is on the safety system design of automotive vehicles, with a special interest in crash-worthiness. This type of systems is considered computationally complex. I have also worked as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) at TMAC, which is a research center of the College of Engineering at UTA, where I have participated in different projects related to my Industrial Engineering career. The opportunity I have had of being a GRA has definitely increased my vision about how to deal with real-life problems.

Through my experiences at UTA, I have learned and realized that I was not only fulfilling a dream but I was also becoming part of a big and great family. Although being away from your beloved ones is not an easy thing, being around with such an amazing people like students, professors, co-workers and friends have made of this experience an amazing journey. Sharing cultures, beliefs and ways of life is an incredible opportunity to mature and expand your horizons.

Written By Nadia Martinez, IMSE Doctoral Student
Email: nadia.martinezcepeda@mavs.uta.edu
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nadia-martinez/4a/243/670

On Sunday, December 16, 2012, the College of Engineering conducted its commencement ceremony at UTA’s College Park Center to recognize students who had completed their degrees during the Fall and Summer semesters. The Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Department graduated eleven undergraduate, twenty-eight master’s, and six doctoral students. We want to take a moment to congratulate all our graduates on their achievement. Below is the list of our Fall 2012 Graduates, as listed in UTA’s student newspaper.

On November 16th, COSMOS Ph.D. student Bancha Ariyajunya successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “Adaptive Dynamic Programming for High-Dimensional, Multicollinear State Spaces.” His dissertation committee included COSMOS faculty Dr. Victoria Chen, Dr. Jay Rosenberger, and Dr. Li Zeng. His dissertation addressed the problem of correlated variables in a dynamic programming state space. His methodology was originally motivated by airport deicing activities and was tested on an ozone pollution control optimization. In airport deicing, the state of the system considers the environmental impact of deicing, and the environmental variables are highly correlated. In ozone pollution, the state of the system considers ozone concentrations in the air, and these are highly correlated over time and space. Bancha’s research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. His current research interest is in the area of statistical modeling and data mining.

The IMSE Department at UT Arlington offers degrees in Industrial Engineering at the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. levels plus Masters degrees in Logistics, Engineering Management, and Systems Engineering. Since we only offer a doctoral degree in Industrial Engineering, students can focus their degree in areas of expertise such as Systems Engineering. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on one of those students and how she plans to apply her research to real-world needs.

Misagh Faezipour is a Ph.D. candidate at the Industrial Engineering department with a focus in Systems Engineering. She is also affiliated with the System Engineering Research Center (SERC). She has worked as a graduate research assistant on multiple projects in the SERC and is currently a graduate teaching assistant at the IE department. Her research interests lie in the areas of engineering complex systems, healthcare, sustainability, simulation, systems thinking & systems dynamics. The focus of her current research is in Systems Engineering with an emphasis on sustainability related to Systems Engineering and applied to the healthcare domain. Her dissertation is related to addressing water sustainability in hospitals. System dynamics is applied as a modeling approach to provide a better understanding of the water sustainability considerations & model key factors and interrelationships involved in hospitals. A simulator is being developed that simulates the interactions of the key factors from the model. The simulator will help decision makers realize the impacts of their decisions made related to some key factors and also help then make informed decisions. The hospitals are the main stakeholder in this research, and the goal is to help them with their water management process and support them to make informed decisions.