ISE News and Events

ISE Faculty Thomas C. Sharkey has been awarded the 2015 Rensselaer Alumni Association Teaching Award. The RAA Teaching Award was created in 1994 by the Rensselaer Alumni Association Board of Trustees and is designed to recognize current members of the Rensselaer Faculty for their outstanding teaching techniques, contributions to the campus experience and commitment to students. Professor Sharkey has a set of video tutorial on YouTube about operations research methods http://homepages.rpi.edu/~sharkt/ORMVideos.html.
ISE welcomes Dr. Jennifer Pazour joining Rensselaer as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Pazour received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2006, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from University of Arkansas in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She joined University of Central Florida (UCF) in August 2011. She received the prestigious Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2013. She was also named the CAE Link Faculty Fellow from the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences at UCF from July 2012 to August 2014.
ISE Associate Professor David Mendonça and Cognitive Science Professor Wayne Gray recently received an RPI Presidential Graduate Fellowship to support groundbreaking research on teamwork in high tempo, adversarial environments. The project will employ data from the online game League of Legends (LoL). With approximately 70 million registered players and 12 million daily players, LoL is the most popular game in the world.
Rensselaer Engineering Dean Shekhar Garde and ISE Head John Wen visited Albuquerque, New Mexico, on July 15. An alumni reception was held together with the Sandia National Lab with alumni spanning 50 years. Director of the Sandia Lab, Dr. Paul Homert, (class of 72, Aero), last day before his retirement, gave a welcome speech. Dean Garde described the latest initiatives and news in the School of Engineering. Prof.
ISE faculty Bill Foley is working with St. Peter’s Health Partnership to investigate the effectiveness of medical scribe in physician’s office. Dr. Foley led a team of two undergraduate researchers to collect data in a local primary care physician office. His work is described in Times Union.

Institute News

Mars experts and researchers from the Rensselaer Astrobiology and Research Education (RARE) Center will host a virtual watch party of the NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing.
TROY, N.Y. — Jonathan Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann ’42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), for his “contributions to methods for rapidly screening drug efficacy and toxicity, and biocatalytic technologies for improving human health.”
In an era of required social distancing and stressed medical resources, a virtual clinical environment that allows doctors and nurses to safely practice intubating a simulated COVID-19 patient, among other necessary procedures, could accelerate and enhance training efforts.
Triage care on the battlefield requires split-second decision-making and proficiency in providing first aid. Correctly applying a tourniquet or inserting an intubation tube before a patient is evacuated to a hospital could save lives. To improve training for the field medics responsible for this level of care, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will team up with researchers from the United States Army Research Laboratory in Orlando, Florida, to better understand skill acquisition and to standardize the prolonged field care (PFC) certification process.
Hudson Valley Community College has long been a pipeline for students to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and now those interested in starting their engineering degree at the SUNY community college and transferring to the prestigious four-year university can follow a newly-updated transfer agreement between the neighboring Troy institutions.