Energy and Sustainability

Boilermakers are known for their persistence. Few "societal grand challenges" present as urgent and as complex as the need to look at how we steward the Earth and build sustainable systems. A sampling of our work includes new ways of delivering energy, distributed control systems for grid management as energy sources diversify, optimizing resource use, guiding policy and implementation of conservation practices non an equitable way, and finding new ways of making more sustainable practices and items.

If you have a passion for sustainability and caring for Earth in a time of change, Industrial Engineering will give you a multitude of tools to make a real difference.

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Team


Team Leaders

David Johnson
Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Associate Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering;
Joint Appointment with Political Science

Research Interests

Decision-making under uncertainty, applied to climate change adaptation and environmental policy

Flood risk modeling

Sustainable agriculture

Environmental risk communication and decision support tools

Multi-criteria tradeoff analysis

Andrew Liu
Associate Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Interactions of optimization

Game theory and Industrial organization, with applications to model and analyze energy markets and environmental policy

Siva Seetharaman
Assistant Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Control systems

Machine learning

Networks

Energy

Transportation

Cyber-physical systems


Team Members

Stephan Biller
Harold T. Amrine Distinguished Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering;
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business Director of Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises

Research Interests

Leading eXcellence in Manufacturing and Operations (XMO) dedicated to sustainable, digital and physical

Sustainable and flexible supply chains

Sustainable and flexible agriculture in light of climate change

Hua Cai
Associate Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Assessing environmental impacts of smart transportation, shared mobility

Data-driven modeling to inform infrastructure development for sustainability

Decision making for sustainable consumption

AI for sustainable urban development

Behzad Esmaeili
Associate Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering;
Joint Appointment with Civil Engineering

Research Interests

Construction safety

Risk management

Decision making

Ana Maria Estrada Gomez
Assistant Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Resilient energy systems under extreme weather events

Monitoring energy grids under resource constraints

Inference and Algorithms on Networks

Susan Hunter
Associate Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Stochastic optimization

Multi-objective optimization under uncertainty

Simulation modeling and analysis

Applied probability and statistics

Tugba Karabiyik
Lecturer, Purdue Systems Collaboratory

Research Interests

Climate Literacy: Evaluating student proposals to combat climate change using simulations

Undergraduate students’ economic decision outcomes in engineering design

Characterizing students’ systems-thinking skills through agent-based modeling simulation

Yu She
Assistant Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Robots and A.I. for sorting waste and recyclables efficiently

Precision Agriculture; Using data for precise application of field interventions

Optimize manufacturing robots and processes for energy efficiency

Increasing robot capabilities for precise and delicate disaster cleanup

Young-Jun Son
James J. Solberg Head;
Ransburg Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Simulation-based operations scheduling systems for energy reduction and productivity enhancement

An integrated Geographic Information System (GIS), optimization and simulation tools for optimal solar panel size and location

Integration of high-penetration photovoltaics (PV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) using energy storage and demand response

Wenzhuo Wu
Professor, Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering

Research Interests

Environmental energy harvesting (e.g., mechanical, wind, rain, ocean wave, solar, etc.

Data-driven scalable nanomanufacturing for energy harvesting

Nanotechnology for catalysis in hydrogen production

Self-powered sensor technology for environmental sensing

Nanotechnology for clean water production

Miaolan Xie
Joining the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering in Fall 2025

Research Interests

Stochastic Optimization

Data Science

Nonlinear Optimization

Machine Learning

Algorithms

Applications in Healthcare

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