From Student to Teacher: SIE Students Launch Academic Careers
Seunghan Lee and Sara Masoud both found they loved teaching while earning their doctoral degrees in systems and industrial engineering at the University of Arizona. Now, after graduating in summer 2019, they’re both on to positions in academia -- Masoud as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Wayne State University in Detroit, and Lee as an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo.
“Both Sara and Seunghan have been truly outstanding PhD students, and I am sure both of them will continue their excellence and become stellar professors,” said their adviser, SIE department Head Young-Jun Son. “I feel fortunate to have had so many talented and dedicated students in my research group. It has been a lot of fun to work with them.”
Solving Human Problems at the UA
Lee came to the UA from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he earned his master’s degree. After gaining a strong foundation in theoretical modeling, he wanted to apply what he’d learned to solving real-world, human problems. He looked all over the country for the right adviser and found the UA.
“Dr. Son is a really good adviser for people who like to work on simulation,” he said. “My practical training under Dr. Son in different projects makes me really strong as a researcher, teacher and instructor. That’s the perfect preparation for being a professor in academia.”
My practical training under Dr. Son in different projects makes me really strong as a researcher, teacher and instructor. That’s the perfect preparation for being a professor in academia.”
Lee demonstrated the practical use of his research in a paper he co-wrote with Son, “A Hierarchical Decision-Making Process in Social Networks for Disaster Management.” The article, which developed human behavior models to predict how people might act and interact during unforeseen emergencies such as hurricanes, received the Best Paper Award in the area of security engineering at the 2018 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers conference in Orlando, Florida.
Earning National Research Recognition
Masoud saw similar success this year at the IISE annual conference, when a paper on which she was lead author received the Best Paper Award in the area of data analytics and information systems. Her co-authors were Son, PhD candidate Bijoy Chowdhury and professor Russell Tronstad in the UA Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
The article, "Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo Sampling for Optimal Fidelity Determination in Dynamic Decision-Making,” gathered data from industrial workers wearing sensor-equipped gloves. The workers were grafting together different species of tomato plants, but the gloves could be used to track productivity in any task. The researchers developed a system capable of making intelligent decisions about resource allocation to improve productivity, not only detecting abnormalities, but suggesting solutions.
“Our proposed system is able to read the motion of workers through data gloves and radio frequency identification system, evaluate their performance in real time and optimize the fidelity level of decision making, whether operational, managerial or strategic,” Masoud said. “We were able to maximize productivity while managing to minimize the number of changes applied to the facility of interest.”
A History of Success
The two come from a long line of SIE alumni who are now working in academia, including the following in recent years:
- Matthew Dabkowski, class of 2016, now an academy professor of systems engineering and director of the systems engineering program at the United States Military Academy
- Maryam Hamidi, class of 2016, now an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Lamar University
- Yiheng Feng, class of 2015, now an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute
- Sojung Kim, class of 2015, now an assistant professor of engineering and technology at Texas A&M University-Commerce
- Mingyang Li, class of 2015, now an assistant professor of industrial and management systems engineering at the University of South Florida
- Chao Meng, class of 2015, now an assistant professor of supply chain management at the University of Southern Mississippi
- Yiwen Xu, class of 2015, now an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at North Dakota State University
- Qingpeng Zhang, class of 2012, now an assistant professor of data science at City University of Hong Kong
- Nurcin Celik, class of 2010, now an associate professor of industrial engineering at the University of Miami
- Qing He, class of 2010, now the Morton C. Frank Associate Professor in Transportation Engineering and Logistics at the University of Buffalo
