ISE faculty Jennifer Pazour has been selected as a 2016 Early-Career Research Fellow by the Gulf Research Program. Early-Career Research Fellowships recognize professionals at the critical pretenure phase of their careers for exceptional leadership, past performance, and potential for future contributions to improving oil system safety, human health and well being, or environmental protection.
ISE News and Events
ISE Associate Professor Tom Sharkey has been named the recipient of the 2016 IISE Operations Research Teaching Award . This award recognizes Professor's Sharkey's development and deployment of the Virtual Office Hour (see Tutorial webpage with links to youtube videos at http://homepages.rpi.edu/~sharkt/ORMVideos.html). This is a highly competitive award with many outstanding nominees. Professor Sharkey will be recognized in the 2016 IISE Annual Conference & Expo May 21-24, 2016 in Anaheim, Calif.
Al Wallace, the Yamada Corporation Professor in ISE and Ruth Murrugarra, a faculty member in ISE at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile, are experimenting in fall 2015 co-teaching an engineering ethics course in New York and Santiago, Chile using Internet connection, and voice recognition and language translation softwares.
ISE Faculty Jennifer Pazour was invited by Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) as one of five industry thought leaders to the WERCSheet’s Outlook 2016 panel to share her observations and insights on critical issues likely to impact the warehouse/distribution-center sector this year. Jennifer focused on the impact of the millennial generation on workforce and warehouse logistics technology. Her remarks are featured in the January/February 2016 issue of the WERC Sheet .
David Mendonça, an Associate Professor in ISE, is now serving as director of the National Science Foundation's program in Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events. Throughout this program's long history, it has supported foundational research on the interaction between human and technological systems in the context of hazard mitigation and disaster response. Mendonça is the first ISE faculty member to serve as an NSF program officer. His research has previously been supported by multiple NSF grants, including a CAREER award for his work on improvisation in emergency response.
Institute News
A novel form of polymerized estrogen developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute can provide neuroprotection when implanted at the site of a spinal cord injury — preventing further damage. This promising result, found in a preclinical model, was recently published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, and it lays the groundwork for further advancement of this new biomaterial.
Future roads will likely carry autonomous vehicles that communicate with one another in a system where vehicles relay information — like destination, speed, or upcoming lane change — and then receive real-time feedback about decisions like route changes necessary to avoid traffic.
Envisioning an animal-free drug supply, scientists have — for the first time — reprogrammed a common bacterium to make a designer polysaccharide molecule used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals.
The era of widespread remote learning brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic requires online testing methods that effectively prevent cheating, especially in the form of collusion among students. With concerns about cheating on the rise across the country, a solution that also maintains student privacy is particularly valuable.
When a pandemic and a natural disaster hit a community simultaneously, disease exposure and social distancing can limit the availability of critical personnel, leaving a community positioned for a lengthy recovery. With both types of events expected to occur with increasing frequency, a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been running simulations to better understand how communities can weather concurrent crises.