“Dr. Rivero brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to our institution,” said Forrest Masters, Ph.D., interim dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. “Her dedication to interdisciplinary research, advanced manufacturing techniques, and commitment to excellence in education makes her an invaluable addition to our community.” 

Dr. Rivero comes to UF after serving five years as the Kate Gleason Professor and Department Head of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her experience in higher education also includes her various faculty positions at Iowa State University and Texas Tech University. Dr. Rivero earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from Pennsylvania State University, all in industrial and manufacturing engineering. 

Throughout her career, Dr. Rivero has successfully spearheaded numerous research projects funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA. Her accomplishments are further highlighted by numerous awards for research, service, and teaching, with notable mentions including the Society of Manufacturing Engineers John G. Bollinger Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award and the Woman of the Year in Education by the Hispanic Association of Women. Additionally, she is a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, serving as the first Hispanic woman to be selected. 

Dr. Rivero replaces David Kaber, Ph.D., the Dean’s Leadership Professor, who has served as chair of ISE since 2018. Dr. Kaber will depart from his role after helping transform ISE into one of the top departments in the country during his tenure. In his span as the department chair, ISE has peaked with the 11th-best graduate program and 12th-best undergraduate program among public universities nationwide by the U.S. News & World Report. ISE also experienced significant growth in enrollment numbers in both programs during the Fall 2023 semester. 

“The ISE department has undergone a major transformational change over the past five years and has an advancing trend in rankings due to excellent faculty research and student academics,” Dr. Kaber said. “Dr. Rivero is an experienced and recognized scholar and academician in industrial and systems engineering, and I am confident that she will take ISE to the next level through excellence in ISE science and practice.” 

Dr. Rivero’s research group, the iMED laboratory, has made significant strides in designing scalable manufacturing techniques incorporating additive manufacturing for diverse material systems, ranging from biopolymers to metal alloys and concrete. At UF she will be expanding her research to industrialized construction in collaboration with her colleagues in ISE, the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment, and the College of Design, Construction and Planning as part of a $2.5 million project using strategic funding from the office of UF President Ben Sasse. For this purpose, the iMED lab will be moving into Weil Hall Structures and Materials Laboratory with a large-scale 3D printer capable of printing warehouses and buildings, among other structures.  

Dr. Rivero also has extensive industry experience in advanced manufacturing systems and materials, having worked with Detroit Diesel Corp., Honeywell Engines & Systems, Pratt & Whitney, and John Deere. Her contributions extend to collaborations with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where she served as a faculty fellow. In her role as department chair, she will seek to strengthen ties with industry. 

“We are confident that under Dr. Rivero’s leadership, ISE will reach new heights of innovation, collaboration, and achievement,” Dr. Masters said. “Given her combination of professional and educational experience, we know she will make an excellent addition to our Gator engineering team.”

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Using a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Mostafa Reisi Gahrooei, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE), will work to design a systematic data collection method that estimates the level of damages based on current information and adaptively guides data collectors to locations where the damage-level estimates are highly uncertain. This method will allow data agents to collect reliable data under severe time and resource constraints. 

“Extreme events often create unexpected situations that cannot be predicted beforehand,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “For example, while there are excellent predictions about how a hurricane may hit an area, the impact, level of damage and location of damage for that hurricane is very difficult to predict.” 

The proposed method first constructs a pre-disaster preliminary probabilistic model of physical damage levels for different structures. This model uses domain and expert knowledge of a region to preliminarily estimate how the region may be impacted by an extreme event before it happens.  

“Such a model estimates what the damage would look like in a region based on our knowledge of building distributions, type of buildings and built environment, land use, etc.,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “However, this is only a baseline as the actual impact of an extreme event depends on many factors related to the event itself.” 

 The model will determine initial trajectories for multiple data collectors to maximize information gain in the shortest possible time. 

“For example, we may have a few drones flying over to collect data regarding the level of damage and a few humans who are driving around to collect data.” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. 

This data collection system will use a novel hierarchical Bayesian framework, which allows for continual updating of beliefs about the level of damage caused by an extreme event, based on new observations.  

“As we collect data from a zone, or multiple zones, we continuously update our belief about the damage levels in the entire impacted region through the Bayesian framework,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “This continuous belief updating will allow us to identify what zones should be visited next.” 

The outcomes of this project will set the stage for the development of automated damage assessment systems that will result in more efficient and successful emergency management operations. 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

“This project was motivated by the fact that the adoption of emerging technologies in infrastructure systems significantly impacts equity,” Dr. Yang said. “There is a lack of systematic ways to define fairness for systems with high dynamics, and little is known about the fairness tradeoffs.” 

As an example, Dr. Yang cites how newly emerging electric scooter systems are going against the overall equity model that is present in existing infrastructures, like public transit. Because of the unique challenges that come with measuring fairness in electric scooter access and use, the research by Dr. Yang is set to provide policymakers with a more holistic picture to guide decision-making on various regulations that can uphold public transit equity principles in access to individualized transportation systems. 

“We will build a new optimization model to effectively compute the price of fairness at various levels of fairness in system access using a diverse set of fairness measures. We will also perform extensive tradeoff analyses to assist in policymaking on fairness in system use,” Dr. Yang said. “We hope to verify that these measures can precisely evaluate system fairness and that our optimization models can effectively compute the efficiency loss due to newly enforced fairness requirements. These developments are expected to support comprehensive analysis of fairness and the efficiency of tradeoffs.” 

A case study that involves shared micro-mobility systems and various experiments using real-world data will be used to help conduct and analyze tradeoffs and provide insights for fairness policymaking. The research findings will be implemented into undergraduate and graduate courses to help show the challenges of measuring and promoting fairness in civil infrastructure system access through new emerging technologies.

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

This fall, ISE has welcomed 15 new Ph.D. students, which is the largest entering class in the past five and a half years. One way the department has been able to bring on new students is through the newly implemented First Year Ph.D. Fellowship Program. Using the Harbert S. Gregory ISE Endowment fund, this fellowship program provides a stipend, tuition assistance, and health insurance for up to two Ph.D. students in their first year of study. Kaber said, “These are highly prestigious fellowships that allow students to enter our program without a defined work commitment and to align with a faculty member (over time) based on their specific research interests.” 

In the master’s program, ISE welcomed 39 new students on-campus and through the UF Electronic Delivery of Gator Engineering (EDGE) program. The department also saw 48 new students join the Outreach Engineering Management (OEM) master’s program. The current total ISE graduate population is approximately 200 ISE students. The department has utilized the new Haldeman M.S. Admission Scholarship to further support new student access to ISE programs beyond the existing Academic Achievement Scholarships through the College of Engineering. Using support from the Harold D. Haldeman Jr. Endowment fund, the program provides up to 20 scholarships per year of $2,500 for a master’s student to conduct ISE research with a faculty member. 

The departmental growth has also included the undergraduate program. During the past three years, the four-year graduation rate for the BS ISE program increased from approximately 12% to 37.1%, while the time to degree decreased from 4.92 years to 4.39 years. Despite the program moving more students to job placement sooner, program enrollment has increased since suppression of the pandemic. Student enrollment settled at a low point of 405 during spring 2023 but is now on the rise at an expected 462 students for the Fall 2023 semester. Related to this, the ISE program is experiencing the highest level of transfers in the past five years with a total of 82 new students entering the program this semester.  

“With the continuing increase in the state population and more students seeking engineering degrees covering methods and tools that flexibly apply to a broad range of applications,” Dr. Kaber said, “ISE programs are becoming high-growth majors of choice for students entering and studying at UF.” 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Dr. Reisi Gahrooei will work with co-principal investigators Yiannis Ampatzidis, Ph.D., an associate professor, and Ute Albrecht, Ph.D., an associate professor, both with the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Southwest Florida Research and Education Center (UF/IFAS SWFREC). 

“In a centralized approach, farms share their data with a central server to develop analytical models to support farm decision-making,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “Under this scenario, farmers may be hesitant about how their data is being used and whether it is shared with other third parties and growers.” 

The researchers proposed a new approach to design algorithmic solutions that allow farms to keep their data locally instead of sharing it with a central server. Each farm creates a local model that is transmitted to an aggregator. Once an aggregated model is created, it is then broadcast to each farm to create a personalized model that supports local decision-making. The approach eliminates data-sharing requirements while still allowing for benefit to be gained from knowledge that exists in other farms. 

“The fundamental methodologies developed in this project should be applied to real datasets collected at multiple agricultural farms, with potentially different data collection protocols and standards,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “In addition, data collected at various farms often differ in size and distribution due to economic and geographic differences. Addressing these differences to develop generalizable models useful to all participating farms is very challenging.” 

The group of researchers plan to evaluate the proposed “federated farming analytics” in modeling a collection of citrus farms as a case study. Along with this, the proposed cyberinfrastructure can easily be adapted to other specialty crops, especially other tree crops, and production systems. The group looks to focus on perennial crops, such as fruit trees, nut trees, and key vegetable crops. 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Michael Hirsch, Ph.D.
Industrial & Systems Engineering

Dr. Hirsch is the president of ISEA TEK, which focuses on delivering exceptional system and software capabilities for commercial and defense applications. ISEA TEK rigorously applies concepts from the mathematical sciences to develop innovative and computationally robust technologies. ISEA TEK has deep expertise in optimization, information fusion, autonomy, cooperative control, resource allocation and machine learning. ISEA TEK has received multiple contracts to develop technologies in support of the U.S. Government, specifically the Department of Defense.

Dr. Hirsch has spent the past 25-plus years developing innovative technical solutions for both defense and commercial problems. He worked for AMPAC Technologies from 1996 – 2001, and Raytheon Technologies from 2001 – 2014. During this time, Dr. Hirsch focused on leading both small and large research teams, developing mathematical models, algorithms, prototype code and embedded software flight code.

Dr. Hirsch earned a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering (Operations Research concentration) from the University of Florida, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Delaware and a B.A. in Mathematics from West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

See the complete list of engineering alumni honored in the Gator100.

The panel was moderated by Michelle Alvarado, Ph.D., ISE assistant professor. The featured panelists were Anna Nagurney, Ph.D., the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Pinar Keskinocak, Ph.D., the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at The Georgia Institute of Technology, Elif Akçali, Ph.D., ISE associate professor; and Xiaochen Xian, Ph.D., ISE assistant professor.

The panel addressed several topics related to inequalities in treatment and perception women face that may occur within the workplace, such as unconscious bias [1], decreased opportunities for promotions, or other merit-based recognition in the course of an academic career. Defined as formed opinions or stereotypes of people outside of conscious awareness, unconscious bias has impacted the careers of many women over the years and can occur in various forms.

Dr. Akçali offered the following, “The number of female faculty members is increasing. There is an increased recognition of the challenges faced by them. These are clear. However, there are still unconscious as well as systemic biases [1] toward female faculty that need to be addressed until there is no longer a need to give different types of advice to male and female faculty members.”

One form of unconscious bias can be how female faculty members tend to receive lower instructor evaluations compared to their male counterparts [2]. In addressing the topic of teaching and teaching evaluations, the panel commented on how women faculty may more frequently receive destructive criticisms and/or criticisms with non-academic themes (e.g., appearance, clothing, managing work-life balance). It was also noted how critically important it is for tenure and promotion committees as well as academic unit, college, and university administrators to be aware of this type of bias, and that it may need to be taken into account in merit-based, promotion, and tenure decisions.

During the panel, each woman shared their personal experiences in academia, focusing on barriers they may have faced as a woman along with moments in which they were encouraged. The panel was asked to comment on prominent women mentors they have had over the years and it was noted that support has been provided not only from women but also from men.

Katie Basinger-Ellis, Ph.D., ISE instructional assistant professor, said that when it comes to mentoring, “It’s just as important for men to give time and space for women as it is for women to give time and space for women.” Additionally other panelists noted that one can have multiple mentors at the same time, and that the pool of mentors can change over time as the individual progresses throughout their career.

The panel addressed challenges of work-life balance and how this proposition is often more difficult for women to address than men, as a result of family commitments. It was observed that the association of a “woman’s worth” with child-bearing is an antiquated notion and having children is a personal choice. For those women who desire to have children, there are unique challenges they may face during the course of an academic career. Due to the multi-dimensional workload of faculty positions (research, teaching, service, etc.), there is a need for women faculty, in particular, to have flexibility for balance of work and personal life. A number of attendees also shared examples of positive experiences in balancing life with work.

Many of the attendees considered this event to serve as a mentoring opportunity for students, staff, and faculty alike. One of the panelists commented that mentoring can take many forms and often occurs in “one-off conversations and gatherings,” like the panel. Karen Hicklin, Ph.D., ISE assistant professor, said, “It was nice to be in the room with women who have accomplished so much in their careers. I appreciated the opportunity to engage with mentors that I may not otherwise have the opportunity to engage with.”

This panel provided an opportunity for a diverse group of faculty, students, and staff to hear the voices of successful women in academia. Although women remain an identified minority in the field of engineering, David Kaber, Ph.D., Dean’s Leadership Professor and ISE department chair said, “At UF, the representation of female faculty has been growing in many disciplines, including ISE. The increase in highly talented female engineering faculty in our college is important to encouraging more female students to pursue engineering degrees and to ultimately take positions in academia and industry, as well as lead our discipline.”

References:

[1] Banaji RR, Greenwald AG. 2016. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Random House Publishing Group.

[2] Aragón OR, Pietri ES, Powell BA. Gender bias in teaching evaluations: the causal role of department gender composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 120: e2118466120. PMID 36649402 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2118466120

The UF ISE Alumni Leadership Awards program was initiated in 2009 with an inaugural class being inducted into the “Hall of Fame” at the department’s 75th Anniversary celebration. In each subsequent year, the department has inducted multiple alumni leaders for a total of 29 current members. The criteria for the award include professional work for 15 or more years after graduation; a requirement for application of ISE education through a breadth of career opportunities with exemplary outcomes; as well as notable service contributions to the engineering discipline or University. The process for selection involves nomination by either the ISE Advisory Board or faculty along with faculty review and a vote on candidates.

Josh Bass graduated with his bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering in 1997 and completed an MBA through UF’s Warrington College of Business Administration (WCBA) in 1999. Bass currently serves as the vice chair of the ISE Advisory Board. In his professional career, Bass began work with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting followed by OpenPeak and several leadership roles in technology and strategy with Florida Power and Light (NextEra Energy). Most recently, he served as vice president for Corporate Enterprise Strategy for JM&A, the largest Toyota distributor in North America, and he is currently responsible for the development of new products, actuarial science and applications, and data and analytics as a sustaining JM&A vice president. Bass served as the chair of the ISE Advisory Board Development and Research Committee for three years and has given multiple graduation addresses and speeches for department student programs. Beyond this service, Bass is a board member for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Science and Discovery and volunteers for Feeding South Florida and Habitat for Humanity. Bass resides in South Florida with his wife, Andrea, and their three boys. They enjoy traveling and attending multiple Gator games each year.

Trey Lauderdale graduated with his bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering in 2004 and completed a master’s in entrepreneurship through UF WCBA in 2007. Lauderdale currently serves on UF’s National Foundation Board. He regularly volunteers his time to speak to ISE student organizations, including the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers as well as the Society for Health Systems, regarding career trajectories and critical decision-making. Lauderdale is currently an entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the area of digital health technology. He started his professional career by founding Voalte Corp. to develop smartphone technology to support secure caregiver communications both in and outside hospitals and to support data analytics on communications to improve healthcare organization operations. Voalte was acquired by Hillrom Corp. in 2019, and Lauderdale took a leadership role as general manager and vice president for Hillrom’s Care Communications business unit and was responsible for the digital growth strategy of the company. Hillrom was acquired by Baxter in December of 2021, and Lauderdale exited the company shortly after the acquisition. Lauderdale currently serves on the advisory boards for multiple digital health startup companies. In 2019, he endowed the Lauderdale Industrial & Systems Engineering Faculty Fellow. Since this time, the fellowship has been awarded to two faculty members conducting research in health systems engineering, including Drs. Xiang Zhong and Honcheng Liu. Lauderdale is an avid Gators fan and returns to campus whenever possible to catch a game and participate in university, college and department events.

ISE is proud of our outstanding alumni, including Bass and Lauderdale, who have transformed the world in different ways to make work and life better for society. The department is also appreciative of their exemplary commitments of knowledge and time to enhance our programs and operations for current students. The faculty and the ISE Advisory Board extend sincere congratulations to Bass and Lauderdale on being the newest members of the UF ISE Hall of Fame.

“This ranking reflects the tremendous growth of the ISE faculty, their outstanding contributions to the discipline as well as those of our top graduate students,” said David Kaber, Ph.D., Dean’s Leadership Professor and department chair. “We are elated with this recent recognition by our peer department leaders and are emboldened to additional impactful research in ISE for improving work life and society.”

Six of the UF engineering college’s disciplines — agricultural engineering, biomedical engineering, computer engineering, industrial engineering, materials engineering and nuclear engineering — are listed among the Top 15 public programs. Overall, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, which saw its research expenditure grow by more than 10%, ranked No. 26 among all public institutions.

For further information on Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering graduate rankings, visit the College website.

Allison Logan
Communications Manager
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering