Message from the Chair

I am honored to be Chair of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

The historic $25 million gift to our department over the past two decades has transformed research and teaching in industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California. In 2002, we became the first named academic department at the university thanks to the generosity of the Founder of ConAm Management Corporation, Daniel Epstein. Over the past year, with the ongoing support of this gift, we have been continuing to recruit outstanding faculty as we plan for our move into a state-of-the-art building to house the department at the University Park Campus.

With our department's research and teaching focus in optimization, predictive analytics and algorithms, we are excited to play a role in USC's historic $1 billion Frontiers of Computing initiative, the largest academic initiative in the university's history. The investment will bring a wealth of opportunities for research, teaching and innovation in the advanced computation space.

We recently hosted the 2023 Mixed Integer Programing (MIP) Workshop at USC, under the leadership of Andres Gomez. The event showcased the latest research and trends in the mixed integer and discrete optimization field.

Faculty Achievements

Noteworthy accomplishments by the faculty during the past year include Sze-Chuan Suen being honored with an NSF CAREER Award for her work developing approaches to guide policy and decision-making in the health sector. Jong-Shi Pang was presented with USC's highest honor — a Distinguished Professorship — for his exceptional contributions to the field of optimization. He was also included in Research.com's Top 500 Scientists for 2022. Grid Computing pioneer Carl Kesselman was awarded the prestigious 2023 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Internet Award, recognizing his significant career achievements in internetworking.

We were immensely proud to see Neil Siegel honored by President Joe Biden with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in a ceremony at the White House during October. The nation's highest recognition of technological achievement was presented to Professor Siegel for his pioneering work in systems engineering including command-and-control, situational awareness, and the wireless internet.

Renyuan Xu was awarded the SIAM Activity Group on Financial Mathematics and Engineering Early Career Prize. I was also proud to be inducted as a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) at the recent Annual Meeting in Phoenix.

Petros Ioannou was elected as a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow for his leadership in adaptive and nonlinear control systems, vehicle dynamics and control, intelligent transportation systems, autonomous and connected vehicles and freight transportation and applications.

Andres Gomez and his collaborators received a grant from DURIP to support a cutting-edge new GPU cluster that will find its home in our department's new campus facilities. The cluster will be invaluable to our faculty and students, enabling large-scale computing research on distributed optimization and learning.

We were also thrilled to see our faculty members Meisam Razaviyayn and Phebe Vayanos promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure.

Student Achievements

Our department is fortunate to be home to a talented cohort of students. A number of them were recently recognized for their outstanding achievements.

Three of our students, Peijing Liu (and her advisor Andres Gomez), Caroline Johnston and Weizhi Lin were recognized for their work at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

Janet Choi, who has been working on improving access to online education for students with learning differences, was honored with the 2023 Viterbi Neighborhood Service Award. Sarah Hakim, co-creator of student entrepreneurship showcase Trojan Marketplace, was honored with the 2023 Viterbi Trojan Transfer Student Award. Ph.D. student working on optimization in transportation and machine learning, Ali Ghafelebashi was recently awarded the 2023 Scholarship from ITS California and California Transportation Foundation.

Please enjoy more highlights from our past year, featured in our newsletter below. Like USC as a whole, our commitment to excellence is evident in our state-of-the-art curriculum, distinguished faculty, and exceptional students.

Maged Dessouky, Dean's Professor and Chair