SSIE Department achieves key milestones in 2020

Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty and students from the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science had many accomplishments in 2020.

The department has 26 faculty members, which, according to American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) data, puts it in the top 10 in the United States in terms of faculty size and research expenditures. Watson College also has the second-largest doctoral program in industrial engineering/manufacturing and similarly named U.S. programs. According to U.S. News & World Report, SSIE also has the highest-ranked graduate program at Binghamton.

COVID response

As the coronavirus came to the U.S. and the Binghamton area in early March and affected campus life throughout the rest of the year, SSIE faculty members stepped up to help.

• Assistant Professors Fuda Ning and Jia Deng worked with Scott Schiffres (an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering) to design and 3D-print ventilator adapters that would have allowed multiple patients to use one ventilator, in case of overwhelming medical need.
• Professor Hiroki Sayama and PhD student Shun Cao offered input about how to best reopen campus to students this fall by looking at the Binghamton University campus from a bird’s-eye perspective. Sayama collected data to simulate a typical day of activity. Choosing a random Tuesday last fall, he and Cao built a time-lapse model to identify “hot spots” when and where crowds of people would make proper social distancing more difficult.
• Sayama also worked with School of Management (SOM) faculty to explore what an adaptive strategy to reopen businesses after COVID-19 would look like. The team, consisting of Shelley Dionne, associate dean of SOM, and Francis Yammarino, distinguished professor, created computational models to resume economic activities while accounting for social distancing guidelines.
• When students returned in August, President Harvey Stenger asked Professor Sangwon Yoon and Assistant Professor Soongeol Kwon for advice on how to improve the COVID-19 testing and check-in process.
• SSIE alumni Vrushabh Shah and Lindsay Wax used the skills they learned in the one-year graduate health systems program in Manhattan to track the spread of COVID-19 and to aid patients in New York City-based hospital networks.

New faculty

Five new assistant professors joined the SSIE Department in fall 2020.

• Zeynep Ertem (PhD, Texas A&M University)
• Chelsea Jin (PhD, University of Arkansas—Fayetteville)
• Zimo Wang (PhD, Texas A&M University)
• Hyunsoo Yoon (PhD, Arizona State University)
• Yingge Zhou (PhD, Texas Tech University)

Watson College will also get its first named professorship in fall 2021 when Luis Rocha, PhD ’97, will join the team to become the George Klir Professor for Systems Science. The position honors Klir’s groundbreaking work in complex systems throughout his career at Binghamton University from 1969 to 2007.

Research

• In addition to the COVID-19 research mentioned above, Professor Sangwon Yoon’s many projects were featured in the Watson Review magazine earlier this year. Industrial collaborations include partnerships with companies like Innovation Associates, Toyota Material Handling North America, Raymond Corp. and additional healthcare companies. Several of his graduate students published a paper about streamlining traffic at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to manage weather delays and to avoid late departures and arrivals.
• Meanwhile, Assistant Professor Jia Deng has been principal investigator on a Binghamton University research project that recently won a three-year, $609,436 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate a new method of producing these microscopic circuits.

Student achievements

SSIE students did well at various competitions around the country this year and won the three major internationally recognized competitions in modeling and simulation.

• The Binghamton team of Farouq Halawa and Hala Ghali (with SSIE Department Chair Mohammad Khasawneh as competition advisor) won first place at the Society for Health Systems FlexSim Simulation Competition at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement (HSPI) 2020 conference.
• At the international Simio Systems Student Simulation Competition, the Binghamton team of doctoral students Ingyu Lee and Arushi Agarwal (with Professor Sangwon Yoon as advisor) won first place for its entry about improving warehouse operations.
• The Binghamton team of Kayla Tang, Summer Purschke and Isabelle Poptean (with Assistant Professor Daehan Won as advisor) won first place at the IISE/Rockwell Arena Automation Undergraduate Simulation Competition.

Also, a senior capstone project by Megan Coles, Lynn Edwards, Stephanie Ragusa, Rachel Russo and Yingyu Chen (under advisor James Henenlotter) was featured in the Watson Review. They collaborated with Susquehanna Interfaith in Montrose, Pa., to plan a better system for its thrift store after a move to a new location.

Alumni spotlight

Here are just two of the remarkable SSIE alumni we caught up with in recent months.

• The featured speaker at Engineers Week in February was Lavanya Gopalakrishnan, MS ’98, a senior director of customer experience at Cisco. Among the lessons she learned at Binghamton was that “nothing’s too difficult if you can put in the effort to go get it done.”
• Busayo Aworunse, PhD ’20, talked about completing his doctoral degree in industrial and systems engineering while maintaining a full-time job as a production support engineer. The coursework from SSIE, he says, will be invaluable to his future career: “You know that what you learned in class today is what you’re going to be doing in the office tomorrow.”