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Ten Industrial & Systems Engineering students were inducted into the Mississippi Alpha Chapter of Alpha Pi Mu during an initiation ceremony held on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 in Chapel of Memories on the campus of Mississippi State University. Daniela Gonzales, Xuan Liu, Robin Littlejohn, Chris Magee, Kevin Martin, Greg Schuster, Missie Smith, Arashish Tarapore, William Williford, and Shu Zhang all accepted invitations to join the industrial engineering honor society that recognizes outstanding students. To be considered for membership, a student must be in the upper one-fifth or one-third of his or her respective junior or senior class rankings. In addition to recognizing outstanding students, Alpha Pi Mu encourages activities and movements which will advance the best interest of industrial engineering education and industrial engineering profession. The active members of the Mississippi Alpha Chapter extend a warm welcome to the new members and would like to congratulate them on their academic achievements.

Congratulations to ISE senior Josie Smith. She competed nationally to receive one of nine scholarships from the industrial engineering honor society Alpha Pi Mu.

Josie was also recently inducted into the Bagley College of Engineering Student Hall of Fame. The hall of fame award recognizes students who have made outstanding contributions to their departments, the college and Mississippi State during their time here at MSU. She was selected from nominations made by the faculty, staff and students.

Josie is a distinguished scholar and an active member of the ISE department’s student representatives. She has also served as an MSU Roadrunner since her freshman year and is a member of the honor societies of Phi Kappa Phi, Tau Beta Pi, Alpha Pi Mu, and Lambda Sigma. Josie has also been active as a youth counselor at Starkville’s First United Methodist Church.

MSU industrial and systems engineering student, James “Stan” Morelock, won 1st place in the Student Technical Paper Competition during the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Region 3 student conference held at Mississippi State University on February 28 to March 2. The Region 3 is composed of 16 universities in the southeastern United States including Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Florida, Auburn, Louisiana State University, and University of Puerto Rico. Stan’s paper was based on an engineering project that he completed at Caterpillar using Six Sigma methods. Stan advances to the national competition to be held at the IIE Annual Conference and Expo in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in May.

The ISE department is proud of Stan, and congratulates him on this outstanding achievement.

Researchers from the Social Science Research Center (SSRC) and ISE faculty members Lesley Strawderman, Mingzhou Jin, and Kari Babski-Reeves are serving as co-principal investigators on an approximately $1.7 million project entitled “The National Highway Watch Analysis and Improvement Program.” The project is a joint effort by SSRC and ISE, with Art Cosby and Royce Bowden serving as the project’s co-directors. The project is funded through the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The project aims to improve the Highway Watch (HWW) Program. The HWW Program is an effort by ATA and DHS to protect the country’s roadways and infrastructure by training transportation professionals to be aware of their surroundings. HWW trained professionals report suspicious activity, dangerous conditions, and roadway conditions. ISE faculty members and students and SSRC researchers will be evaluating the current training system and developing a decision support tool to help optimize the allocation of the program’s resources.

For additional information, contact Lesley Strawderman at (662) 325-7214 or strawderman@ise.msstate.edu.

Dr. John Usher, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been named associate editor of the International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise (IJCEnt). The IJCEnt provides a global forum for exchanging research findings on new concepts for the systematic integration of methods dealing with people, process and technology that can lead to the development of capability for the Design of Enterprise. IJCEnt publishes high-quality original papers presenting new methods for the design of enterprises and is double blind peer-reviewed.

It is a significant honor to be placed on a journal’s leadership team. Congratulations, Dr. Usher.

Three Industrial and Systems Engineering students were inducted into the Mississippi Alpha Chapter of Alpha Pi Mu during an initiation ceremony held on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 in McCain Engineering Building. Amy Bullington, David Callahan, and Carl Morris all accepted invitations to join the industrial engineering honor society that recognizes outstanding students. To be considered for membership, a student must have demonstrated academic prowess and character. In addition to recognizing outstanding students, Alpha Pi Mu encourages activities that advance the best interest of industrial engineering education and the industrial engineering profession. The active members of the Mississippi Alpha Chapter extend a warm welcome to the three new members and would like to congratulate them on their academic achievements.

Elliott Flaggs has been selected for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation/Wal-Mart Emerging Leaders Internship Program. The emerging leaders program is designed to give students internship opportunities within the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the Federal government. Elliott will be representing Congressman Bennie Thompson’s District, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. Elliott was honored with the internship based on his scholastic achievements, demonstrated leadership abilities, interests in public policy, strong writing skills, and his significant community service contributions. He will receive housing, a stipend, and a travel allotment as part of the internship award.

Congratulations, Elliott!

Jackson Rice, an ISE graduate student advised by Dr. Burak Eksioglu, is the recipient of the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship from the Department of Defense. Jackson received one of approximately 100 awards from a pool of 1,500 applicants. The scholarship includes annual stipend, full tuition, book allowance, health insurance, paid summer internship and post-graduation employment placement with the United States Air Force.

The SMART program is managed by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) on behalf of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The American Society of Engineering Education works with NPS to execute the program. We are very pleased that Jackson’s academic success in our program has been recognized in this way.

Professors Burak Eksioglu, Sandra Eksioglu, and Mingzhou Jin of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) are Co-Principal Investigators with Clay Walden and Steve Puryear from CAVS Extension of a $131,000 grant from the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT). Their goal is to assist MDOT with preliminary site planning for prospective automotive manufacturing plants.

The project builds upon the recently completed work that focused on analyzing several of Mississippi’s prospective automotive manufacturing sites from the perspective of outbound logistics (shipping products from the site). The previous work resulted in the development of a methodology that can be used to assess a prospective manufacturing site from the standpoint of outbound logistics. The same is needed for inbound logistics (receiving raw materials into the site) and is the focus of the MDOT grant. The new project contains two components in terms of analysis of prospective automotive assembly sites: development of an inbound traffic model and identification of requirements the inbound traffic poses to the transportation infrastructure. Once a site is selected, then MDOT’s engineering team must develop preliminary plans and infrastructure designs within a compressed time schedule.

ISE and CAVS routinely support economic development in Mississippi. For additional information, contact Burak Eksioglu at (662) 325-7625 or beksioglu@ise.msstate.edu.

Dr. Kari Babski-Reeves, Assistant Professor of ISE, is co-principal investigator on a project entitled “Validation of Optimization-Based Formulations and Performance of Dynamic Human Models: A comparison of real and simulated design assessments”. This $1.2 million CAVS initiated project is being performed in conjunction with the University of Iowa’s Virtual Soldier Research program for the U.S. Army. The objective of this research is to perform large-scale motion validation studies of computerized humanoids. Motion capture data from human subjects performing various activities (lifting, reaching, etc.) will be compared to simulated human motions of the virtual soldier allowing for the improvement of motion prediction fidelity from computerized humanoids. Ultimately, the research will allow Department of Defense designers of materials, clothing, and vehicles the ability to evaluate prototype designs before manufacture for usability and human use issues. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants will be vital to the successful completion of the project. For further information, contact Dr. Kari Babski-Reeves at 662.325.1677 or at kari@ise.msstate.edu.