This program supports activities related to
- workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion;
- increasing diversity of the ISyE faculty, staff, and student body and, more broadly, the academic community at Georgia Tech and the field of industrial and systems engineering;
- new collaborations, initiatives, or partnerships aimed at broadening participation.
The ISyE DEI Fellows program fits within the overall vision and mission of the recently created Center for Academics, Success, and Equity (CASE) in ISyE. The program is open to all academic faculty and staff members in ISyE.
2023 Cohort
Lisa Cox & Monike Welch
HR Administrative Manager (LC) & Events Coordinator II (MW)
Lisa Cox & Monike Welch plan to engage the staff in discussions on DEI in ISyE in collaboration with the ISyE DEI Committee. A series of four gatherings will be organized in which Lisa and Monike will facilitate discussions with staff covering a set of topics and engage in activities which will allow staff to openly share their thoughts and experiences. The gatherings will be held off-campus, providing an atmosphere that feels less like work and an environment that feels less constrained.
Arthur Delarue
Assistant Professor
As the largest industrial engineering department in the US, ISyE is able to advance groundbreaking research across a wide variety of topics thanks to faculty, students and staff with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. The ISyE Faculty Lunch program aims to build connections between faculty with different research interests, backgrounds, and seniority levels - with the end goal of enhancing collegiality and fostering new interdisciplinary collaborations.
Daniela Estrada
Academic Program Manager
Daniela Estrada will use this project to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in undergraduate research by increasing her efforts focused on recruiting URMs for the ISyE UG Research Scholars Program. The goal is to expand its outreach, and the number of applications and ultimately the number of participants through a series of events, recruitment efforts and even lecture series at HBCUs in Atlanta. Daniela will work closely with other DEI Fellows Mohit Singh and Rohan Ghuge.
Siva Theja Maguluri
Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor
Personal mentorship is one of the most important factors in being a successful researcher. As a young researcher, Siva Theja was extremely fortunate to have received highly beneficial advise and mentorship from senior researchers. As a DEI fellow in ISyE, he will work with one young researcher from URM background and mentor them one-on-one over a short period of approximately one semester. This will provide the researcher an opportunity to spend time in ISyE, interact with faculty and students here, learn a new set of research skills, and more importantly be exposed to a culture of excellence in research.
Nicoly Myles
Director of the Center for Academics, Success, and Equity
Women's History Month is an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. During March 2024, the Center for Academics, Success, & Equity (CASE) will recognize and celebrate ISyE current women students and alumnae in the industrial engineering field. The Center will host a variety of events that include an industrial and systems engineering women speaker series, events that are tailored to the ISyE women student population and other events. At the end of the month, a celebration luncheon/reception will conclude the month of activities.
Mohit Singh & Rohan Ghuge
Associate Professor (MS) & Ronald J. and Carol T. Beerman/ARC Postdoctoral Fellow (RG)
Rohan Ghuge and Mohit Singh are spearheading a program which aims to promote interest and awareness about Operations Research (OR) among students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It consists of two parts: a lecture series introducing OR and its applications, career opportunities, and scholarships, followed by an on-campus event featuring faculty research and networking opportunities. The long-term goal is to foster inclusivity, attract underrepresented minority students to summer internship programs, and empower students to pursue graduate studies in OR, driving innovation and diversity in the OR community.
Juba Ziani & Weijun Xie
Assistant Professor (JZ) & Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor (WX)
Dr. Ziani and Dr. Xie will organize a two-day workshop at Georgia Tech to broaden participation in research and increase ties between young researchers of diverse backgrounds and Georgia Tech ISyE. The workshop will solicit applications in Fall 2023 and/or early Spring 2024 and select which applicants will participate in the workshop in Spring 2024. The workshop is likely to be comprised of: (1) Presentations, lightning talks, and posters by participants; (2) Mentorship activities; (3) “How to” talks that will give young researchers basic tools and advice to be successful in academia and on the job market; and (4) Roundtables and networking with other researchers and faculty members with similar interests.
2022 Cohort
Gian-Gabriel Garcia
Assistant Professor
Gian Garcia is working with CASE to establish a mentorship program focused on connecting graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty from diverse groups by facilitating the formation of non-dyadic mentorship relationships. The over-arching goals of this program are for every participant: (1) to have mentors at all levels (e.g., senior mentors, peer mentors), (2) to develop their skills as a mentor and mentee, and (3) to have an opportunity to practice mentorship. The project dovetails the MentIEs program and will expand the reach of CASE beyond undergraduate students.
Pascal Van Hentenryck
A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor
Pascal Van Hentenryck is designing and initiating an educational program for high schools that covers an introduction to computing, an introduction to computational and data science, and a module on “Deep Learning the Field”. He is also initiating a program to help HBCUs and MSIs offer minors and major in AI at their institutions.
Juba Ziani & Weijun Xie
Assistant Professor (JZ) & Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor (WX)
Juba Ziani and Weijun Xie invited researchers from various backgrounds inside and outside Georgia Tech who work on DEI and justice research as well as students from underrepresented communities to deliver a seminar, either in person or virtual, and meet with our students and faculty members, if possible. Their project promotes DEI as well as justice and social impact-related research to ISyE students and faculty, especially Ph.D. students, by incorporating DEI and justice topics in the broader sense into the optimization and machine learning seminars. Second, it gives students from underrepresented backgrounds and with fewer opportunities to do so a chance to share their research.
Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Associate Professor (YX) & Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research (NS)
Yao Xie and Nicoleta Serban plan to engage faculty members in discussions on DEI among faculty and graduate students in ISyE in collaboration with the DEI ISyE Committee. A series of mini-retreats will be organized in which participants discuss a set of topics and share their thoughts in a relaxed atmosphere outside of campus and of their work and life responsibilities.
Yao Xie & Nicoleta Serban
Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor and Associate Professor (YX) & Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research (NS)
Yao Xie and Nicoleta Serban engaged faculty members in discussions on DEI among faculty and graduate students in ISyE in collaboration with the DEI ISyE Committee. A series of mini-retreats was organized in which participants discuss a set of topics and share their thoughts in a relaxed atmosphere outside of campus and of their work and life responsibilities.
2021 Cohort
Dave Goldsman
Director of Master's Programs and Coca-Cola Foundation Professor
Dave Goldsman developed a mechanism to introduce faculty members at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and certain Women’s Colleges to Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of ISyE. The aims were to (i) familiarize those faculty with what we do in ISyE, particularly at the graduate level; and (ii) encourage them to send us their best students for joint BS and/or graduate study. This is complementary to the project led by Lauren Steimle, and synergistic with the aims of ISyE’s Center for Academics, Success, and Equity (CASE).
Shelley Wunder-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor
Shelley Wunder-Smith plans to expand the “In Conversation” series that she developed to highlight a wide range of minority voices in the ISyE community. This series was started during and after the social justice protests that followed the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, when Shelley invited black ISyE alumni and students to share their thoughts on the current moment, as well as their experiences of being Black in STEM and at Georgia Tech.
Lauren Steimle
Assistant Professor
As DEI Fellow, Lauren Steimle worked with the INFORMS Student Chapter, and ISyE’s Center for Academics, Success, and Equity (CASE) towards initiating, establishing, and sustaining an outreach program to attract students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), minority-serving institutions, and Women’s Colleges in Georgia and increase their representation in ISyE and INFORMS at large. With support from this program, the project's graduate student assistant Anjolaoluwa Popoola planned events at which the INFORMS chapter's members were able to present their research and graduate student experience to undergraduate students across the country. Through these events, prospective students were encouraged to apply and attend GT's FOCUS event which enabled the sharing of information about the graduate school application process.
Chen Zhou
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor
Chen Zhou will work to enhance the diversity of graduate students by collaborating with Historically Black Colleges and universities (HBCUs) on research and exchange. His work on supply chain for well-being can create engaging and productive conversations with colleagues and students in HBCUs. It can also attract interest in conducting research to find engineering solutions to some of the problems to align the supply chain with the goal of improving human’s long-term well-being.
During the first year of his term as DEI Fellow, he organized a group of students to study the low consumption of fresh food in food desert and in college campuses and published the results in the IISE Annual Conference May 2022. He joined Dr. Goldsman to communicate with Mathematics Department at Agnes Scott College to attract their graduates to apply for MS programs in ISyE. During the second year of his term as DEI Fellow, he conducted research on the high-cost of low-cost food supply in US and worked with CASE to interact with more HBCUs to attract students to join our research and apply for graduate school at Georgia Tech.