High School Students Hosted by OU ISE

OU ISE professor Kash Barker, with the help of graduate students Emma Kuttler and Alyssa Pletcher, hosted several high school students on Saturday, June 5, 2021. The future engineers learned about the ISE profession, the diversity of career fields they may find, and several tools and methods that ISEs employ. They also participated in interactive games introducing concepts network optimization and simulation. 

More information about OU Engineering Days can be found here: https://ouccoe100.blogspot.com/2021/07/ou-summer-program-introduces-high.html

OU ISE Faculty Member Janet Allen Recognized At Annual Celebration

ISE faculty member Janet Allen was among several GCoE faculty who received honors for their outstanding work during the 2021 OU Faculty Tribute. A John and Mary Moore Chair in the OU School of ISE, Allen was presented with the Vice President for Research and Partnerships Award for Excellence in Applied Research and Engineering. She is known for her work in decision-based design and formulating problems and modeling uncertainty.

Learn more here: https://ouccoe100.blogspot.com/2021/06/ou-engineering-faculty-receive-top.html

Q&A with Ricardo Palma Fraga, ISE PhD Student

OU ISE doctoral student, Ricard Palma Fraga, was recently interviewed by the OU GCoE. Read more here: https://ouccoe100.blogspot.com/2020/11/q-with-ricardo-palma-fraga-ise-phd.html

Q&A with Ricardo Palma Fraga, ISE PhD Student

OU ISE doctoral student, Ricard Palma Fraga, was recently interviewed by the OU GCoE. Read more here: https://ouccoe100.blogspot.com/2020/11/q-with-ricardo-palma-fraga-ise-phd.html 

OU Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Recognized With Award for Supporting Students

NORMAN, OKLA. – Janet Allen, University of Oklahoma professor of industrial and systems engineering, was named the recipient of the 2019 Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award.

One of the highest honors bestowed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to engineering design education through scholarship creation, instructorship, and as a mentor and role model.

Allen is one of the founders of the National Science Foundation/ASME Travel Grant Program, which she has helped run for more than 20 years. This program created a Student Design Essay Competition, funded by the National Science Foundation. Winners are awarded grants to travel and present their work at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences annual ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

“Students go to the conference and talk to whomever they want, present their ideas and get feedback,” Allen explains. “It gives them the tools to continue to develop their careers.”

Since the creation of the grant, nearly a dozen essay winners have gone into the academic field, even sending students of their own to the conference.

Appropriately, Allen was nominated by a former student, Wei Chen, who is a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University.

“Professor Allen is passionate about encouraging students to rise to their full potential,” Chen wrote. “Through her educational and outreach efforts, she has positively influenced the lives of hundreds of undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty members.”

Allen joined the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Along with Professor Farrokh Mistree, she established the Systems Realization Laboratory, with a focus on engineering design. Additionally, Allen holds the John and Mary Moore Chair of Engineering at OU.

“We’re all extremely proud of our students,” Allen says. “We want to continue to help make their lives better, particularly their experiences in grad school.”

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University Of Oklahoma’s Hands-On Engineering Course Profiled

The Norman (OK) Transcript (5/22) reports that over the last 25 years, University of Oklahoma industrial and systems engineering (ISE) students “have supplemented courses they take at OU with ‘hands-on’ machining/design of manufacturing experience at Moore Norman Technology Center.” Most ISE students cannot operate “the machines that make the parts they are designing, an important step ISE Interim Director Shivakumar Raman thinks is necessary for engineering practice.” Raman believes the University of Oklahoma’s partnership with MNTC “is the first and only hands-on undergraduate engineering partnership like it in the country.” More than 90 engineering students are currently enrolled in Raman’s class, compared to 16 in Raman’s inaugural class.

Faculty and Students Representing OU ISE at the IISE Annual Conference

The OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering had a strong showing at the 2018 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida. OU ISE was represented by Drs. Kash Barker, Andres Gonzalez, Ziho Kang, Shima Mohebbi, Charles Nicholson, and Shivakumar Raman, as well as Dr. Nazanin Morshedlou, recent ISE doctoral graduate, ISE grad students Vera Bosco, Nafiseh Ghorbadi Renani, and Deniz Berfin Karakoc, and DSA grad student Alexander Rodriguez.

OU ISE Associate Professor Kash Barker co-chaired the conference program with Chase Rainwater of the University of Arkansas and Diana Berry of Harsco Rail, overseeing the abstracts, extended abstracts, proceedings papers, and schedule for nearly 1200 presentations across 22 tracks. OU ISE’s strategic application focus in cyber-physical-social systems engineering was on display in the Security Engineering and Safety, Human Factors, and Ergonomics tracks with several student and faculty presentations and organized sessions.

In addition to current OU ISE students and faculty attendees, also pictured are Dr. Pedro Heubner, new OU ISE faculty member and recent doctoral graduate from North Carolina State University, Dr. Deji Badiru, former OU ISE faculty member and dean of OU’s University College who is currently dean of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Dr. Cameron MacKenzie, OU ISE doctoral graduate and assistant professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University.