Binghamton University

04/19/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/19/2024 10:16

SSIE Department celebrates successes for spring 2024

The spring semester at Binghamton University is nearly over, and Commencement ceremonies in May will celebrate this year's graduates. The Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science continued to excel in education and research during the 2023-24 academic year.

Research news

Assistant Professor Ankit Bansal won a $244,008 grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a study of how counties in West Virginia allocate their funding to mitigate the opioid crisis. The research aims to provide better guidance for policymakers.

Assistant Professor Chao "Amanda" Shi wants to make smart manufacturing and other related sectors safer by revisiting the Situation Awareness Rating Technique (SART) to measure how "present" soldiers, air crews, nuclear power plant employees and factory workers are.

The team of doctoral students - Vision (Xin) Wang, Samer Abubaker and Grace Babalola - and Assistant Professor Stephanie Tulk Jesso collaborated with United Health Services (UHS) to co-design an artificial intelligence chatbot to improve patient experience in the hospital. The team will present the work at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems conference, which takes place in Honolulu, Hawaii, in May.

Faculty news

SUNY Empire Innovation Professor Carlos Gershenson has been elected president of the international Complex Systems Society. His three-year term starts at the CCS'24 conference in Exeter and London in September.

Professor Sangwon Yoon won the 2024 Outstanding Regional Faculty Advisor Award for the Binghamton University Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Student Chapter and the U.S. Northeast Region. The award recognizes advisors who have demonstrated substantial contributions to the chapter by supporting officers and student activities through excellence as a teacher, advisor and mentor.

Assistant Professor Sreenath Chalil Madathil, SSIE Department Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor Mohammad Khasawneh, andSUNY Distinguished Professor Mark Poliks were among those honored as "career champions" by Binghamton University's Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development. Honorees are nominated by students for helping them find their purpose, identify their career goals, solidify academic or professional plans or gain employment.

Student news

Nazila Bazrafshan, PhD '24, began working as a graduate research associate at the Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (WISE) within Cooper University Healthcare in New Jersey, and she later was offered a full-time position and continued to work there as an operational excellence specialist while continuing to pursue her doctoral degree.

At the 2024 Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference, Team Real (Duxiao Hao and Layan Abu-Ghoush, with Assistant Professor Yu "Chelsea" Jin as advisor) received first place in the SHS/FlexSim Model Building Competition - FlexSim Autodesk. Also, Fabiha Islam, Isiah Turner, Clay Battle and Mark Fuchs (with Assistant Professor Chao "Amanda" Shi as advisor) received first place in the poster competition for their work on "Cognitive and Driving Performance in Conditionally Automated Vehicle: A Study of Healthy and Concussed Individuals."

Alumni news

Ryon Batson '21 used the knowledge from his industrial and systems engineering degree when he co-founded FairSplit, an artificial intelligence-powered insurance company designed to reduce tensions between workers and employers during employee transitions.

George Lourentzatos '12, MS '15, will receive a BOLD (Bearcats of the Last Decade) 10 Under 10 Award from the Binghamton University Alumni Association. He is currently the chief of strategy and operations at Union Health Center, and leverages his expertise in operational excellence and cost reduction to drive positive change. He says that Watson College and the SSIE Department prepared him not just for professional success but also nurtured lifelong relationships with classmates and professors.