Sixteen IE graduate students entered posters and presented them to faculty, fellow students, and Industrial Engineering Advisory Council members in Grissom Hall. After the hour-long presentation, the IEGSO held a Q&A discussion with four 2017 OIE alumni, Karen Ashley, Mike Heard, Albert Jones, and Ravi Talwar, and the 2018 Pritsker Lecturer and alumnus Barry Nelson.

Ashley (MSIE 1991) heads Cisco Corporate Development Integration. Heard (MSIE 1989, BSIE 1988) was appointed president of Washington National in March 2017, and served previously as senior vice president of enterprise operations for CNO Financial Group. Jones (PhD 1978, MSIE 1972) is the Scientific Advisor for the Systems Integration Division in the Engineering Lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Talwar (MSIE 1969) is the President of Gate City Steel, Inc. Nelson (PhD 1983) is the Walter P. Murphy Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Lancaster University in England.

The alumni answered questions and discussed the impact of their Purdue IE experience on their career and the decisions they made along their way to success.

After the panel discussion, Shounak Joshi, IEGSO chair of academic affairs, presented prizes for the top four posters:

• 1st prize – Michelle Jahn, for "Identifying Team Structures & Information Coordination Patterns for Diabetes Care Teams"
• 2nd prize – Anna Tatara, for "Stochastic Processes & Local Asymptotic Normality"
• 3rd prize – Jackie Cha, for "A Ruler to Your Brain: Measuring Workload Through Brain Activity Signals in Simulated Robotic Surgery Tasks"
• 4th place - Behnam Sadri, for "Epidermal Paper-based Electronic Devices"

Congratulations, grad students!

(l) IEGSO poster competition; (r) Anna Tatara explains research to Dr. Barry Nelson, Pritsker Lecture speaker.

(l) Ravi Talwar listens to grad student presentation; (r) Prof. Seokcheon Lee and grad students

(l) IEAC member Mike Heard listens to grad student; (r) Dave Kotterman with visitors

(l) OIE alumni panel; (r) Karen Ashley answers questions about encouraging women in IE 

Writer & Photographer: DeEtte Starr, starrd@purdue.edu