Department Head's Message: Growth and Leadership Make for a Standout Year

Dear friends,

Thanks to your support, this newsletter is chock-full of good news.

Two more faculty members joined the UA Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering in 2018. Welcome, Hongyue Jin and Mohammed Shafae. Jin is an expert in optimization for circular economy, and Shafae specializes in security for cyberphysical manufacturing systems. That makes nine new faculty in the last three years, and another hire is expected in 2019.

Likewise, with 372 undergraduates and 212 graduate students, fall enrollment saw a 36 percent increase over 2017. SIE awarded 84 bachelor’s, 37 master’s and four doctoral degrees in 2018.

Change Is in the Air

We salute former College of Engineering dean Jeffrey Goldberg, who became the UA’s interim senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, and SIE professor Larry Head, who is interim dean. Congratulations also to Roberto Furfaro, Wei Lin and Ricardo Valerdi for their promotions to full professors.

University honors, professional awards and research grants are stacking up, too. The UA named Valerdi its faculty athletic representative. Furfaro and David Gross received a $3.3 million cooperative agreement grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and Furfaro's team won a multiuniversity lunar exploration competition. Sherilyn Keaton received a UA Blue Chip Leadership Experience award. Sean Wu won the best paper award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Vignesh Subbian received a half-million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for his traumatic brain injury research as well as a UA distinguished fellowship. Jian Liu, in collaboration with Kevin Lansey, received a half-million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new generation of water distribution system monitoring systems. Qiang Zhou and Neng Fan received a SBIR Phase I grant from the Department of Energy to develop cyber-secure anomaly detection for power plants. And Hongyue Jin received a research grant from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop techno-economic and life-cycle analysis models for value recovery of rare earth elements from coal byproducts.

SIE is also excited to be hosting the INFORMS annual meeting in Phoenix on Nov. 4-7. It’s the event of the year for operations research, management science and analytics.

We are pleased to announce that Accumen chief growth officer Ted Landis (BS 1990) is SIE’s 2018 Alumnus of the Year. Thank you, Ted, for inspiring students and contributing to SIE’s success.

Sadly, professor John Ramberg, who was on the faculty from 1978 until 2003 and served as department head between 1981 and 1988, died Feb. 3, 2018. His wife preceded him in death on Nov. 27, 2017. They are greatly missed.

A Homecoming to Remember

We look forward to seeing you at Homecoming on Oct. 26 and 27 when your Wildcats take on the Oregon Ducks. Come see old friends, meet new ones and share your insights on teaching, learning, research and partnership. And be sure to stop by the department’s annual barbecue and graduate student poster presentation. Go Cats!

Kindest regards,

Young-Jun Son