ISE News and Events

The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering is re-establishing the ISE Faculty Award for Excellence. This award recognizes and supports outstanding accomplishments in teaching, research, or advising of the members of the faculty (including Tenured/Tenure-Track faculty and Lecturers) of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The 2015 recipient is Professor Thomas C. Sharkey , in recognition of his outstanding research accomplishments and education innovation.
The RPI Student Chapter of IIE hosted the Third Annual Green Belt Six-Sigma Program for RPI undergraduates during the weekend of March 13th -- March 15th. A large group of 41 students registered and successfully completed the program. Each student receives a certificate from the Institute of Industrial Engineers for the successful completion of this training. Congratulations!
The Poplar pipeline spills 31,000-gallon spill on January 17 into the Yellowstone River. It is a rare test of the capacity to respond to oil accidents in frozen water. Its cleanup progresses as the U.S. Senate voted to approve the pending Keystone XL project, which would cross the same river about 20 miles upstream, carrying almost 20 times as much crude.
ISE professors William “Al” Wallace, Martha Grabowski, and Thomas Sharkey, along with DHS Fellow and graduate student Richard Garrett, use computer simulation models to show how coast guard can respond effectively to future oil spills.
RPI faculty John Wen (ISE Department Head), Jonas Braasch (School of Architecture, Director of Center for Cognition, Communication and Culture), and Mei Si (Cognitive Science) held a media morning event showing off their assistive robotics research. Graduate and undergraduate students demonstrated a mobile assistive robot called Jamster, robot teleoperation, and social robotics. Numerous local media outlets reported on the event.

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.