The Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) at the University of Florida has hired five new faculty in 2019 and 2020. Sima Sabani, Ph.D., and Yu Yang, Ph.D., both joined the department this fall.
Sima Sabani, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Sima Sabahi, Ph.D. is a permanent lecturer in ISE. Dr. Sabani graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. She went on to earn a doctorate degree in industrial and systems engineering from North Carolina A&T State University, where her research focus was in the area of educational research, supply chain management, risk analysis and operations management.
Dr. Sabahi has presented her research at several conferences, including the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Annual Conference, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Annual Meeting, and the Production and Operations Management Society Annual Conference. She has published multiple journal articles in the International Journal of Production Economics and the International Journal of Logistics Research and Application. She has also been involved in three research projects funded by the National Science Foundation in areas of supply chain management, education research and data analytics.
Currently, Dr. Sabahi is teaching courses for the department, including Industrial Quality Control and Introduction to Data Analytics.
Yu Yang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Yu Yang, Ph.D., joins ISE as an assistant professor with a research interest in the intersection of discrete and continuous optimization. Dr. Yang received his doctorate in operations research from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Peking University in Beijing, China.
Dr. Yang’s current research focus is on solving optimization models efficiently, from both theoretical and practical perspective, for applications in logistics and healthcare. With this research emphasis, Dr. Yang has been working on a multiple projects including equipment management in logistics service networks, efficient branching strategies for classical integer programs, non-convex optimization in machine learning, and treatment plan optimization in radiation therapy for cancer treatment. As a result, Dr. Yang has developed several state-of-the-art optimization algorithms and he has generated an equipment balancing tool that is undergoing testing for near-term integration in UPS’s Network Planning Tool.
Dr. Yang will be teaching Operations Research for the department Spring 2021. In terms of research, he seeks to build more connections between discrete and continuous optimization, and extend his methodological application areas to include IP models in deep learning as well as model selection in statistics where discrete optimization is underutilized.
“Drs. Sabahi and Yang bring new expertise to our department in data analytics for production and logistics as well as integration of optimization modeling with machine learning for supply chain and network challenges. There are major opportunities for application of new advanced analytical tools in production and supply chain applications and our new faculty members will be educating undergraduate and graduate students on these methods as well as making new research contributions on integrated methodologies,” said David Kaber, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.