IE's Kenley named INCOSE Chair

Industrial engineering professor C. Robert Kenley was recently elected INCOSE Chair by the INCOSE Fellows. The INCOSE Board of Directors has ratified the election, and Kenley will serve as the Chair of the INCOSE Fellows for a 2-year term beginning December 1, 2022.

Professor Kenley was honored as an INCOSE Fellow in 2016 for advancing the application of analytic methods and statistical modeling techniques in systems design and analysis. He has over 30 years’ experience in industry, academia, and government as a practitioner, consultant, and researcher in systems engineering. He also has served on the INCOSE Board of Directors in multiple roles. He also is an expert system engineering

 professional (ESEP). He is a Professor of Engineering Practice in Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering, where he has been developing courses and curricula to support the educational objectives of the Purdue Systems Collaboratory. In this role, he has sponsored multiple undergraduate and graduate student projects at Purdue in collaboration with INCOSE.  He has published papers on systems requirements, technology readiness assessment and forecasting, Bayes nets, applied meteorology, the impacts of nuclear power plants on employment, and model-based systems engineering, and agent-based modeling for systems of systems.

Professor Kenley notes that, “Unlike many other fellows in professional societies, the INCOSE Fellows have a track record for continuing to contribute as individuals and as a group to advance the aims of INCOSE and the state of the art and practice in systems engineering. Comprised of a unique combination of researchers and practitioners in the field, there is a critical mass of expertise among the INCOSE Fellows that can contribute to the INCOSE goal of making a better world though a systems approach. I plan to continue engaging Purdue students with INCOSE broadly and specifically with the Fellows to contribute to the education of our students and to inspire them to make a lifelong commitment to the goal of the Purdue Systems Collaboratory of tackling complex challenges to move the world forward.”

The mission of the Fellows Committee is to advance the state of the science, art, and practice of Systems Engineering. The Fellows Committee serves as an action forum to achieve its mission and to expand the service of the Fellows to INCOSE and society. Examples of such activities include the establishment of expertise groups to advise INCOSE and society and developing of publications, presentations, and position papers pertaining to systems engineering. A notable recent contribution of the INCOSE Fellows was to update INCOSE definitions of “system” and “systems engineering” to align them to the current state of the practice and to the aspirations of INCOSE’s vision to apply system engineering to a broad range of application domains such as biomedical, defense, healthcare, power and energy, telecommunications, and transportation.

The INCOSE Fellows are individuals who have made significant contributions to the art and practice of systems engineering in industry, government, or academia. This award recognizes practitioners from government and industry applying knowledge and contributing to the practice of systems engineering in designing and acquiring systems, researchers developing new knowledge, pushing the theory forward, and teachers disseminating knowledge and developing the next generation of successful systems engineers.

Related link: INCOSE