Scores of Faculty Accomplishments in 2018

Oct. 16, 2018

The faculty of the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering were a force to be reckoned with in 2018, making great strides in professional, research and industry circles.

Assistant professor Vignesh Subbian, in addition to being selected for a Center for University Education Scholarship Distinguished Fellowship, also joined a research team developing a system of algorithms to provide drug interaction alerts, and received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study traumatic brain injuries.
As well as being named acting dean of the College of Engineering, professor Larry Head led the Vehicle Communications Research Consortium and made advancements in connected vehicle technology.

Newly promoted professor Ricardo Valerdi took an action-packed sabbatical year, with his Science of Sport nonprofit growing from a baseball-focused middle school program to a worldwide phenomenon that includes multiple sports. The Los Angeles Dodgers joined Science of Baseball, making them the 10th MLB team to do so. UA President Dr. Robert C. Robbins also took notice of Valerdi's accomplishments, and appointed him the UA's Faculty Athletics Representative to the PAC-12 and the NCAA.
Wei Lin was also promoted to professor this year.
Professor Roberto Furfaro, another recent promotion, and assistant professor David Gross received a $3.3 million cooperative agreement grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory to clean up space, and Furfaro also led a team of international scientists in a winning effort for the Lunar Exploration Competition.

Professor Changxu "Sean" Wu's paper, "Modeling the Effects of Warning Lead Time, Warning Reliability and Warning Style on Human Performance under Connected Vehicle Settings," won the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s prestigious Best Paper Award in the Human Performance Modeling Tech Group.
Associate professor Jian Liu, in collaboration with Professor Kevin Lansey from the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Mechanics, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $498,949, from August 2018 to July 2021, to develop a new generation of water distribution system monitoring systems and real-time burst detection algorithms within a new interdisciplinary hydroinformatics paradigm by fusing hydraulic knowledge with data-driven spatio-temporal analytics.
Assistant professors Qiang Zhou and Neng Fan, in collaboration with the Ridgetop Group Inc., were awarded with a SBIR Phase I grant of $208,000 (with a UA share of $20,800) from the Department of Energy, from July 2018 to January 2019, to develop a cyber-secure anomaly detection and condition-based maintenance solution for fossil fuel-based power plants.
Assistant professor Hongyue Jin was awarded a research grant of $30,000 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from October 2018 to September 2019 to develop techno-economic and life-cycle analysis models for an innovative biosorption technology for value recovery of rare earth elements from coal byproducts. The fund may renew for another two years based on the project performance.
Lecturer Sherilyn Keaton won the Blue Chip Leadership Program Award after being nominated by SIE student Kevin Nguyen.
Lecturer Sharon ONeal was featured on Raytheon's news page, and on YouTube, discussing the future of young women in science, technology and mathematics careers.
In conjunction with the 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting, the SIE department is hosting a pre-workshop called Data and Decisions by invitation only. This workshop is organized by several SIE faculty and staff, including Pavlo Krokhmal (chair), Jianqiang Cheng, Danielle Embry, Neng Fan, Jian Liu, Matthias Poloczek, Suvrajeet Sen, Young-Jun Son and Qiang Zhou.