Özlem Ergun has been appointed the Coca Cola Associate Professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) for a three year term of service, beginning August 15, 2013. The Coca Cola Early Career Professorship is designed to enhance the ability of ISyE to “attract and retain eminent teacher-scholars.”
Ergun, who is also a co-founder and director of the Center for Health & Humanitarian Logistics, has a passion for applying her industrial engineering and operations research knowledge and expertise in ways that will have a positive impact. Ergun's research focuses on the design and management of large-scale networks. Specifically, she studies logistics and communications networks that are dynamic, partially decentralized, and are used and operated by coordinating but selfish entities. Her main research contributions are the development of a set of new algorithmic and analytical tools and their applications (together with well-known concepts from optimization and game theory) to important real world problems.
Ergun has been recognized with several awards, including the 2011 Georgia Tech Senior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award, the EURO/INFORMS 2007 Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize, the 2005-2007 Most Cited Paper Award from Signal Processing: Image Communication, and the 2003 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. In addition, her students have received almost 20 different awards based on their dissertations, papers, posters, and other accomplishments. She received a B.S. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.
“The Coca Cola early career professorship appointment provides a well-deserved opportunity to enhance Ergun’s growing research and educational impacts,” said Jane Ammons, ISyE School Chair.