Leon McGinnis

Leon McGinnis

Leon McGinnis

Professor Emeritus

Leon McGinnis is a Professor Emeritus in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

Dr. McGinnis's research focuses on fundamental representation issues in discrete event logistics systems, on performance assessment models, and on the development of integrated computational tools. He has been a leader in developing and administering industry-focused and interdisciplinary education and research programs at Georgia Tech. He helped establish the Material Handling Research Center in 1982 and managed one of five research programs over the next decade. He also helped establish the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems Program in 1983, which received a LEAD Award from ASME for excellence in graduate-level interdisciplinary manufacturing education, and served as Director from 1988 to 1998. As CIMS Director, he lead a team that competed for and won a $1 million TRP grant, resulting in the establishment of the Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Institute within the Manufacturing Research Center. In 1994, he led a team of Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering faculty to win over $2 million in grants from the W. M. Keck Foundation to create the Keck Virtual Factory Lab as a focal point for IE systems design and control research.

The Institute of Industrial Engineers has recognized Dr. McGinnis with the Outstanding Publication Award, the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award, and the Fellow Award. He has given the Inyong Ham Lecture at Penn State, the Jones Lecture at Dartmouth, and the Schantz Lectures at Lehigh. 

Dr. McGinnis enjoys teaching students how to think like industrial engineers, particularly in developing and using mathematical and computational models to support design of facilities and control systems. 

He received his BS in IE from Auburn University, and MS and PhD in IE from North Carolina State University. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Georgia.

leon.mcginnis@isye.gatech.edu

404.894.2312

Office Location:
ISyE Main Building, Room 108

Website

Additional Research:
discrete event logistics systems; performance assessment models; development of integrated computational tools

IRI Connections:

Jye-Chyi Lu

Jye-Chyi Lu

Jye-Chyi Lu

Professor

Jye-Chyi (JC) Lu is a professor in in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech (GT).

Dr. Lu is active in promoting research, education and extension-service programs with focus on engineering statistics and analytics areas. Dr. Lu received a Ph.D. in statistics from University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, and joined the statistics faculty of North Carolina State University, where he remained until 1999 when he joined GT-ISyE. He has 82 journal publications in engineering and statistics journals. Twenty seven Ph.D. students has graduated under his supervision.  His research has been supported by many NSF awards and industry grants. He serves as an associate editor (AE) for the Journal of Quality Technology and had served as AEs for Technometrics and IEEE Transactions on Reliability.  He is a Fellow in the American Statistical Association, and has been INFORMS Quality, Statistics and Reliability section chair.

jclu@isye.gatech.edu

404.894.2301

Office Location:
Groseclose Building, Room 312

Website

Additional Research:
information systems engineering; e-business; e-logistics; e-design and industrial statistics areas

IRI Connections:

Christos Alexopoulos

Christos Alexopoulos

Christos Alexopoulos

Professor

Christos Alexopoulos is the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies as well as a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

Dr. Alexopoulos' research interests center on applied probability, statistics, and optimizations of stochastics systems. His recent work involves problems related to the optimal design of telecommunications and transportation networks.

christos.alexopoulos@isye.gatech.edu

404.894.2361

Office Location:
Groseclose Building, Room 429

Website

Additional Research:
Applied probability; statistics; optimizations of stochastics systems; design of telecommunications and transportation networks

IRI Connections:

Kamran Paynabar

Kamran Paynabar

Kamran Paynabar

Assistant Professor

Kamran Paynabar is the Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Iran in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from The University of Michigan in 2012. He also holds an M.A. in Statistics from The University of Michigan. His research interests comprise both applied and methodological aspects of machine-learning and statistical modeling integrated with engineering principles. He is a recipient of the INFORMS Data Mining Best Student Paper Award, the Best Application Paper Award from IIE Transactions, the Best QSR refereed paper from INFORMS, and the Best Paper Award from POMS. He has been recognized with the Georgia Tech campus level 2014 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship. He served as the chair of QSR of INFORMS, and the president of QCRE of IISE.

kamran.paynabar@isye.gatech.edu

404.385.3141

Office Location:
Groseclose Building, Room 436

Departmental Bio

  • Personal Website
  • Research Focus Areas:
    • Aerospace
    • AI
    • Automotive
    • Biobased Materials
    • Biochemicals
    • Biorefining
    • Biotechnology
    • Diagnostics
    • Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue
    • Sustainable Manufacturing
    Additional Research:
    High-dimensional data analysis for systems monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics, and statistical and machine learning for complex-structured streaming data including multi-stream signals, images, videos, point clouds and network data with applications ranging from manufacturing including automotive and aerospace to healthcare.

    IRI Connections:

    Jeff Wu

    Jeff Wu

    Jeff Wu

    Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor

    C. F. Jeff Wu is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

    He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2004), and a Member (Academician) of Academia Sinica (2000). A Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1984), the American Statistical Association (1985), the American Society for Quality (2002), and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (2009). He received the COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) Presidents' Award in 1987, which was given to the best researcher under the age of 40 per year and was commissioned by five statistical societies. His other major awards include the 2011 COPSS Fisher Lecture, the 2012 Deming Lecture (plenary lectures during the annual Joint Statistical Meetings), the Shewhart Medal (2008) from ASQ, and the Pan Wenyuan Technology Award (2008). In 2016 he received the (inaugural) Akaike Memorial Lecture Award. In 2017 he received the George Box Medal from ENBIS. In 2020 he won The Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award and the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award both at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has won numerous other awards, including the Wilcoxon Prize, the Brumbaugh Award (twice), the Jack Youden Prize (twice), and the Honoree of the 2008 Quality and Productivity Research Conference. He was the 1998 P. C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lecturer at the Indian Statistical Institutes and an Einstein Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is an Honorary Professor at several institutions, including the CAS and National Tsinghua University. He received an honorary doctor (honoris causa) of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in 2008.

    He was formerly the H. C. Carver Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, 1993-2003 and the GM/NSERC Chair in Quality and Productivity at the University of Waterloo in 1988-1993. In his 1997 inaugural lecture for the Carver Chair, he coined the term data science and advocated that statistics be renamed data science and statistician to data scientist. Before Waterloo, he taught in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin from 1977-1988. He got his BS in Mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1971 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley (1973-1976).

    His work is widely cited in professional journals as well as in magazines, including a feature article about his work in Canadian Business and a special issue of Newsweek on quality. He has served as editor or associate editor for several major statistical journals like Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Technometrics, and Statistica Sinica. Professor Wu has published more than 185 research articles in peer review journals. He has supervised 50 Ph.D.'s, out of which more than 25 are teaching in major research departments or institutions in statistics, engineering, or business in US/Canada/Asia/Europe. Among them, there are 21 Fellows of ASA, IMS, ASQ, IAQ and IIE, three editors of Technometrics, and one editor of JQT. He co-authors with Mike Hamada the book "Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Optimization" (Wiley, 2nd Ed, 2009, 716 pages) and with R. Mukerjee the book "A Modern Theory of Factorial Designs" (Springer, 2006).

    jeff.wu@isye.gatech.edu

    404.894.2301

    Office Location:
    ISyE Main Building, Room 233

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Advanced Manufacturing
    • Bioengineering
    • Biotechnology
    • Energy

    IRI Connections:

    Arkadi Nemirovski

    Arkadi Nemirovski

    Arkadi Nemirovski

    John Hunter Chair and Professor

    Arkadi Nemirovski is the John P. Hunter, Jr. Chair in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. 

    Dr. Nemirovski's research interests focus on Optimization Theory and Algorithms, with emphasis on investigating complexity and developing efficient algorithms for nonlinear convex programs, optimization under uncertainty, applications of convex optimization in engineering, and nonparametric statistics. 

    Dr. Nemirovski has made fundamental contributions in continuous optimization in the last thirty years that have significantly shaped the field. In recognition of his contributions to convex optimization, Nemirovski was awarded the 1982 Fulkerson Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society (joint with L. Khachiyan and D. Yudin), the Dantzig Prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1991 (joint with M. Grotschel). He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2017) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018). 

    In recognition of his seminal and profound contributions to continuous optimization, Nemirovski was awarded the 2003 John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (along with Michael Todd). He He continues to make significant contributions in almost all aspects of continuous optimization: complexity, numerical methods, stochastic optimization, and non-parametric statistics. 

    Dr. Nemirovski earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics (1974) from Moscow State University, the Doctor of Sciences in Mathematics (1990) from the Supreme Attestation Board at the USSR Council of Ministers, and the Doctor of Mathematics (Honoris Causa) from the University of Waterloo, Canada (2009).

    nemirovs@isye.gatech.edu

    ISyE Profile Page

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations

    IRI Connections:

    Yao Xie

    Yao Xie

    Yao Xie

    Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Yao Xie is a Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, which she joined in 2013 as an Assistant Professor. She also serves as Associate Director of Machine Learning and Data Science of the Center for Machine Learning. From September 2017 until March 2023 she was the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Early Career Professor. She was a Research Scientist at Duke University from 2012 to 2013. 

    Her research lies at the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and optimization in providing theoretical guarantees and developing computationally efficient and statistically powerful methods for problems motivated by real-world applications. 

    She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Journal of the American Statistical Association: Theory and Methods, Sequential Analysis: Design Methods and Applications, INFORMS Journal on Data Science, and an Area Chair of NeurIPS and ICML.

    yao.xie@isye.gatech.edu

    404-385-1687

    Office Location:
    Groseclose 445

    ISyE Profile

  • Website
  • Google Scholar

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Machine Learning
    Additional Research:
    Signal Processing

    IRI Connections:

    Joel Sokol

    Joel Sokol

    Joel Sokol

    Fouts Family Associate Professor and Director, MS in Analytics

    Joel Sokol is the Harold E. Smalley Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also Director of the interdisciplinary Master of Science in Analytics degree (on-campus and online).

    His primary research interests are in sports analytics and applied operations research. He has worked with teams or leagues in all three of the major American sports. Dr. Sokol's LRMC method for predictive modeling of the NCAA basketball tournament is an industry leader, and his non-sports research has won the EURO Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize and been a finalist for the Cozzarelli Prize.

    Dr. Sokol has also won recognition for his teaching and curriculum development from IIE and the NAE, held the Fouts Family Associate Professorship for a three-year term, and is the recipient of Georgia Tech's highest awards for teaching. He served two terms as INFORMS Vice President of Education, and is a past Chair and founding officer of the INFORMS section on sports operations research.

    Dr. Sokol's Ph.D. in operations research is from MIT, and his bachelor's degrees in mathematics, computer science, and applied sciences in engineering are from Rutgers University.

    jsokol@isye.gatech.edu

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Materials & Manufacturing
    Additional Research:
    Applied Algorithms; Data Mining

    IRI Connections:

    Guanghui (George) Lan

     Guanghui (George) Lan

    Guanghui (George) Lan

    Associate Professor

    George Lan is an A. Russell Chandler III Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.  His research and teaching interests lie in theory, algorithms and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming.  Most of his current research concerns the design of efficient algorithms for solving challenging optimization problems, especially those arising from data analytics, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. He is actively pursuing the applications of these methodologies in healthcare and sustainability areas. Dr. Lan serves as the associate editor for Computational Optimization and Applications (2014 – present), Mathematical Programming (2016 – present) and SIAM Journal on Optimization (2016  – present). Dr. Lan is an associate director for the center of machine learning at Georgia Tech.

    george.lan@isye.gatech.edu

    Website

    Additional Research:
    Chromatin; Epigenetics    

    IRI Connections:

    Edwin Romeijn

    Edwin Romeijn

    Edwin Romeijn

    Professor and School Chair

    Edwin Romeijn is the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

    His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.

    He previously served as Program Director for the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems, Service Enterprise Systems, and Operations Research programs at the National Science Foundation, and as Professor and Richard C. Wilson Faculty Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Before joining the University of Michigan in 2008, he was on the faculty of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida and the Rotterdam School of Management at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. 

    He is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE), and a member of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

    edwin.romeijn@isye.gatech.edu

    Website

    Research Focus Areas:
    • Algorithms & Optimizations

    IRI Connections: