Thomas Sharkey, an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at RPI, has launched a YouTube channel containing video tutorials to assist in the delivery of an Operations Research (OR) course. At RPI, these videos are specifically geared towards ISYE 4600: OR Methods, a required course for all Industrial and Management Engineering (IME) undergraduate students. The video tutorials serve as “virtual office hours” in the sense that they take students through the steps necessary to capture an application as an OR model or to apply an OR model to solve a problem.
ISE News and Events
The RPI IIE Student Chapter has won the Gold Award for the second year in a row. The award recognizes the chapter's overall achievements in AY 2013-2014. There are nearly 130 active student chapters in the US and the award places us among the top 1/3rd. The Chapter is getting ready for the new academic year with lots of exciting events for the IME students. Recently, the Chapter made contact with the Professional Chapter of Syracuse and is planning to have several joint events with them. These will include site visits, guest speakers, video conferencing and more.
ISE Department Head John Wen hosted an afternoon tea for Rensselaer alumni at the Okura Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan, on August 23. Over 20 RPI alumni and their family attended the gathering. The graduation years span 1980 to 2010. There is now an RPI Taiwan Alumni LinkedIn Page . There is also strong interest to form an RPI Taiwan Alumni chapter.
The 2014 ISE Newsletter maybe viewed here . Highlights: Tom Sharkey's research on supply chain and infrastructure restoration, David Mendonca's work on teamwork in large scale disaster response, Jennifer Ryan's work on semiconductor manufacturing scheduling and inventory management in aircraft engines maintenance, Martha Grabowski's National Academy report on Arctic oil spill response, and Mark Embrechts' course and research related to Big Data.
ISE Associate Professor David Mendonça, in collaboration with Martha Grabowski of ISE, was recently awarded a three-year $337k grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate teamwork in organizations following large-scale disasters. Using data from debris clearance operations following a series of calamitous tornado storms in Alabama in 2011, this work will investigate how team-level processes contribute to overall performance of the debris removal mission.
Institute News
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.
As cancer and tumor cells move inside the human body, they impart and are subject to mechanical forces. In order to understand how these actions affect cancer cell growth, spread, and invasion, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is developing new models that mimic aspects of the mechanical environment within the body, providing new insight into how and why tumors develop in certain ways.