Academics

Industrial engineering faculty, students honored at annual industry conference

Robert Voigt, A. "Ravi" Ravindran and Russell Barton are congratulated on their awards by Janis Terpenny, Peter and Angela Dal Pezzo Chair and Department Head. Credit: Pamela Krewson Wertz / Penn StateCreative Commons

PITTSBURGH — Several faculty and students within the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) were honored for excellence at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference (ISERC) in Pittsburgh.

ISERC is held annually in conjunction with the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Conference and Expo, which started on May 20 and ends May 23.

Russell Barton, A. Ravi Ravindran and Robert Voigt, members of IME faculty, were honored with IISE awards during the event.

Barton, senior associate dean of the Smeal College of Business and distinguished professor of supply chain and information systems, was named a 2017 IISE Fellow. Barton was a member of the IME faculty for 11 years before moving on to Smeal. He continues to hold a courtesy faculty appointment in the Marcus department.

The Fellow Award is the highest classification of membership in IISE and recipients are chosen by the organization’s Fellows Committee. The award recognizes distinguished leaders in the profession that have given significant, nationally-recognized contributions both to mankind and the field of industrial engineering.

Professor Ravindran received the Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Logistics and Supply Chain, which is presented by the Logistics and Supply Chain Division of IISE.

Ravindran will retire from Penn State in June after 20 years of service at Penn State and is a world-renowned author and educator in operations research and supply chain.

Voigt, a professor in IME, was amongst a team of collaborators honored with the IISE’s “I5” Award, which recognized the team’s work in training the next generation of engineers, along with National Oilwell Varco Inc. (NOV), a manufacturing company based in Houston.

The I5 award is presented to individuals that “Implement Innovative Ideas Learned at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo and Improve Organization.” Through their groundbreaking research at NOV, Voigt and his team have done just that, earning them this prestigious award.

Voigt’s collaborators and co-recipients of the award are Ananth Krishnamurthy, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Andy Johnson, associate professor at Texas A&M University.

Janis Terpenny, the Peter and Angela Dal Pezzo Department Head and professor, received an honorable mention for her paper titled “Design Refresh Planning Models for Managing Obsolescence,” in the IISE Transactions Focused Issue on Design and Manufacturing.

As for student awards, doctoral student Osama Alotaik won the Best Student Paper Award in the Sustainable Development Track for his research titled, “Little Data, Big Data, and Food Insecurity: An Integrated Approach.” The paper was co-authored by Varun Chellappa, a Penn State alumnus who received his master’s degree in industrial engineering in 2016; Susan Steadman, a retired staff member at the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank; and Soundar Kumara, Allen E. Pearce and Allen M. Pearce Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State.

Chen-Bang Chen, a doctoral student, earned the Best Paper Award in the Computers and Information Systems Division for his paper titled, “A Novel Pattern-Frequency Tree Approach for Transition Analysis and Anomaly Detection in Nonlinear and Nonstationary Systems.” Co-authors of the paper are Hui Yang, Harold and Inge Marcus Career Associate Professor at Penn State, and Kumara.

Doctoral student Bing Yao won the IISE Health Systems Best Student Paper Competition for her work titled “Physical-Statistical Modeling and Regularization of High-dimensional Dynamical Systems.” Yang co-authored the paper.

Doctoral student Xin Li also received a Best Student Paper Award in the Logistics and Supply Chain Division for his paper titled “Design of a CO2 Supply Chain for Industrial Applications.” The paper was co-authored by Jose Ventura, a professor in the Marcus department, and Luis Ayala, William A. Fustos Family Professor in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

Industrial engineering doctoral students and IISE Best Paper Awardees Osama Alotaik, Cheng-Bang Chen, Bing Yao and Xin Li Credit: Pamela Krewson Wertz / Penn StateCreative Commons

Last Updated May 31, 2017