Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I am thrilled and excited to have become a part of Gator Engineering this past January. Stay tuned for the upcoming academic year as new initiatives ramp up and our facilities get expanded. Also, a big thank you to David Kaber, Ph.D., who served as department chair for five years and has been instrumental in a smooth leadership transition in the middle of a busy academic year—a year in which our department continued to be as dynamic as ever, with significant accomplishments by our students, faculty and alumni. I am extremely proud of them all, and these accomplishments ensure that our department continues to thrive while we uphold our values of providing experiential learning opportunities to our students while conducting world-class research.
This past May, a pair of our undergraduate students, Shreya Bhat and Alondra Gonzalez, were awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) 2024 IISE Manufacturing Student Travel Award to attend the 2024 IISE Annual Conference & Expo in Montreal, Canada. Meanwhile, our graduate program was ranked No. 13 among public ISE graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report, showcasing the quality of education and research that our students and faculty engage in.
On the faculty front, David Kaber, Ph.D., received the prestigious Erskine Visiting Fellowship from the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand. During his time there, he prepared lectures on human information processing, constructs of human cognition, measures of mental workload, cognitive task analysis methods, cognitive performance modeling tools, physiological correlates of cognitive workload, and systems design for cognitive demands. This content will be made available for fourth year (senior) UC students through online resources and will also provide a basis for a similar future course at UF. Kaber was also named a Fellow in the IEEE organization.
Finally, our alumni also achieved great things this year. Scott Bartnick, a 2015 ISE graduate, was named as a Gator100 honoree after his company, Otter PR, ranked fourth on this year’s list. Also, Spring 2024 graduate Franco Nazaria was selected to the UF Division of Student Life 2024 Hall of Fame.
Fantastic things are on the horizon here at UF ISE, and I can’t wait to share more with you in future newsletters. Thank you for your continued support of our department.
Go Gators!
Iris V. Rivero, F. IISE
ISE Department Chair,
Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Chair in Industrial and Systems Engineering