The Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) at the University of Florida has welcomed two new faculty members to Gainesville for the Fall 2024 semester. Suman Chowdhury, Ph.D., and Murwan Siddig, Ph.D., bring years of industry experience with them to campus.

Chowdhury joins the UF ISE department as an associate professor. Prior to the University of Florida, he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering at Texas Tech University. His research areas include computational biomechanics, traumatic brain injury, multiscale brain modeling, ergonomics, and helmets, exoskeleton and prosthetic designs. He received his Ph.D. in occupational biomechanics from West Virginia University in 2016. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2017 and an Assistant Research Scientist at Texas A&M University from 2017 to 2019. He served as the Chair of the Occupational Ergonomics Technical Group of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, USA, from 2020 to 2022. To date, he has secured about $2.2 million in grants and contracts as a lead principal investigator from various federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award (2023).

Siddig joins the department as an instructional assistant professor. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Clemson University in 2021, and also holds a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering from Clemson (2019). He also earned a Master of Science in Actuarial Science from the University of Manchester (2015) and a Bachelor of Science with honors in Economics from the University of Khartoum (2013). Siddig has a distinguished record of teaching several data analytics and optimization courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and is also the recipient of teaching grants awarded by RWTH Aachen University. Siddig joins ISE following a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.