Dear ISE Friends and Colleagues:
I am thrilled to share our Fall 2024 digital newsletter, highlighting the incredible accomplishments of our department this semester. As Florida’s leading ISE program, we continue to excel in providing our students with exceptional experiential learning opportunities while driving world-class research. Our commitment to excellence and innovation remains stronger than ever, and I am proud of all that we have achieved together.
In this edition of our newsletter, we get a chance to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Carlos del Sol, a proud member and graduate of ISE and the Gator Engineering family, who passed away on November 24th, 2024. Carlos was an outstanding leader of our ISE advisory board, an incredible advocate of our program, and mentor to many in our community. In the privileged time I had to spend with him, he left an extraordinary impression as I am certain he did on those he met in the department. We will carry out Carlos’s dedication to our ISE program moving forward with the activities he forged for us, as we continue to develop your engagement in our program.
We also have great news to relay at the undergraduate level, as our program was ranked No. 11 in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings among public ISE programs in the country. Furthermore, ISE senior Yousef Bani Ahmad, who is a member of the research lab I lead, the Interdisciplinary Manufacturing Engineering & Design (iMED) Lab, was awarded the International Student Achievement Award by the International Center at the University of Florida. At the graduate level, many of our doctoral students’ research projects were peer-reviewed and selected for presentation at the 2024 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting this past October. Our students participated in various networking activities while also delivering presentations about their research. One doctoral student and another member of the iMED lab, Andrea Camacho-Betancourt, earned the INFORMS Minority Issues Travel Award, which provided funds to sponsor her travel to Seattle and represent our department.
On the faculty front, we welcomed Suman Chowdhury, Ph.D., and Murwan Siddig, Ph.D., to our department at the beginning of the fall 2024 semester. Both bring years of experience in higher education to Gainesville, and we are excited to see the great things they will accomplish. We also feature two significant grants in this issue. The first, awarded by the National Science Foundation, supports my collaborative research with Minhee Kim, Ph.D., (along with Iowa State University and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota) on developing innovative design algorithms to improve the efficiency of infrastructure construction with the aim of addressing climate change. The second, from the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency, highlights the work of Jorge A. Sefair, Ph.D., who is partnering with the Transportation Security Administration to enhance decision-making processes at airports.
Finally, we welcomed one of the country’s largest and most-advanced 3D printers to Weil Hall in September 2024. This BOD3 printer, created by COBOD, is set to make our department a hub of innovation in Industrial Manufacturing Construction Engineering, or how we call it in UF ISE, Infrastructure 5.0. Moving forward with innovative research, we are working on integrating our solid expertise in Operations Research and Data Analytics to Manufacturing towards the next level of Infrastructure 5.0 construction. In parallel, more importantly, we are working with multiple departments in the college of engineering to develop curriculum that leads the path towards defining one-of-a-kind, infrastructure-driven interdisciplinary research and education. Stay tuned.
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, Ph.D., F. IISE
ISE Department Chair, Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Chair in Industrial and Systems Engineering