ISyE Faculty Awards and Honors

ISyE faculty continue to win prominent awards and recognition. Here are highlights from the past couple of semesters.

INFORMS Fellows

Pinar Keskinocak, ISyE William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor, has been elected an INFORMS Fellow as part of the 2015 class. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech.

Eva Lee, ISyE Professor, was also elected a 2015 INFORMS Fellow. Lee directs the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems at the Health Systems Institute of Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Tech.

INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of OR/MS over a period of time. Their service to the profession and to INFORMS has culminated in election to the INFORMS Fellow Award.

IEEE Fellow

Spyros Reveliotis, Professor, has been elected a Fellow to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has research interests in discrete event systems theory and its applications, especially in the control of flexibly automated production and workflow management systems.

AIAA Fellow

John-Paul Clarke, Professor in Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a courtesy appointment in ISyE, has been elected as a Fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). His research and teaching in the areas of control, optimization, and system analysis and design are motivated by his desire to simultaneously maximize the efficiency and minimize the societal impact (especially on the environment) of the global air transportation system. He has made seminal contributions in the areas of air traffic management, aircraft operations, and airline operations.

Awards

Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and ADVANCE Professor, and Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor, have been honored with George Tech’s 2016 Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement. The Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement recognizes a Georgia Tech faculty member who has demonstrated sustained outstanding achievement and commitment to the advancement of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s global engagement.

Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor, has been selected to receive the 2015 Pythagore Award from his alma mater, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. The award recognizes the exceptional accomplishments of an alumnus, including professional achievements, peer recognition, community engagement, and a strong relationship with UQTR. The award is “the equivalent of a gold medal,” which the recipients receive for offering out-of-the-ordinary education, application of their work, and their achievements.

Jan Shi, Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor, has been awarded the Institute of Industrial and System Engineers (IISE) David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award. The award is given to a single awardee each year in recognition of a career of accomplishments that has broadly benefited practitioners, organizations, or other researchers.

Robin Thomas, Professor of Mathematics, Regents' Professor, and Courtesy Appointment in ISyE, was named the Georgia Tech Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor. The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award recognizes outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and service and is Georgia Tech’s highest faculty honor.

Alejandro Toriello, Assistant Professor, has received a five-year, $500,000 CAREER grant from the NSF. Selection for this award is based on two important criteria: 1) innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology that is relevant to the mission of NSF, and 2) community service demonstrated through scientific leadership, education, or community outreach.

Paper Awards

Linkan Bian, now Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University, has been awarded the Best Paper in the IIE Transactions Focus Issue on Quality and Reliability Engineering for 2016. His winning paper is "Degradation Modeling for Real-Time Estimation of Residual Lifetimes in Dynamic Environments.” He was advised by Georgia Power Associate Professor Nagi Gebraeel.

Eva Lee, ISyE Professor, and her team of collaborators from Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been awarded the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner award for "Machine Learning for Predicting Vaccine Immunity.” The prize emphasizes the quality and coherence of the analysis used in practice and recognizes those principles by emphasizing good writing, strong analytical content, and verifiable practice successes.

Matthew Plumlee, now Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (advised by Roshan Vengazhiyil, ISyE Professor, and Jianjun Shi, ISyE Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor), was awarded the Best Dissertation Award for 2016 by Georgia Tech’s chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

Spyros Reveliotis, Professor, and Ahmed Nazeem (MSIE 2009, Ph.D. IE 2012), shared the 2014 T-ASE Best Paper Award. The award-winning paper is entitled “Efficient Enumeration of Minimal Unsafe States in Complex Resource Allocation Systems.” “T-ASE” stands for Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and is one of the flagship journals of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Valerie Thomas, Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems, along with her collaborators, have had their paper selected as the best operations management paper in the INFORMS journal Management Science. Their paper is entitled “Is Leasing Greener Than Selling?”

Linwei Xin, now Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received the 2015 INFORMS George E. Nicholson Student Paper Award. The award-winning paper was entitled “Asymptotic Optimality of Tailored Base-surge Policies in Dual-sourcing Inventory Systems," co-authored with ISyE Assistant Professor David A. Goldberg.