Faculty news

Professor Vicki Bier co-chaired the National Academy of Engineering meeting, "Accident Precursors: Linking Risk Assessment with Risk Management," in Washington, D.C. in July. The two-day gathering featured discussions about precursor detection and risk assessment, risk management and risk mitigation, and linking risk assessment with risk management.

Professor Pascale Carayon will serve as a scientific editor for Applied Ergonomics, one of the top three journals in the field of human factors and ergonomics, along with Ergonomics and Human Factors. She is also a new consulting editor for Work and Stress, an international, multidisciplinary quarterly, presenting refereed academic papers relating to stress, health and safety, and performance as well as articles of concern to policy makers. In addition, Carayon has been nominated to the executive committee of the International Ergonomics Association, the federation of ergonomics and human factors societies from around the world.

Darek Ceglarek (9K JPG)

Associate Professor Darek Ceglarek (left) and Assistant Professor Shiyu Zhou are part of a team that has received a three-year, $1,987,000 grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) — Advanced Technology Program to develop a computer simulation system for modeling, analyzing, predicting, and optimizing the performance of multistage manufacturing processes requiring accurate parts alignment to improve production and product quality. Co-author of the proposal is Ramesh Kumar of Dimensional Systems Control Inc.

Ceglarek also has been appointed associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE T-ASE). The quarterly IEEE T-ASE publishes foundational research on automation, including scientific methods and technologies that improve efficiency, productivity, quality and reliability, specifically for methods, machines, and systems operating in structured environments over long periods, and the explicit structuring of environments.

Ben-Tzion Karsh (11K JPG)

Assistant Professor Bentzi Karsh is the principal investigator on a new $1.36 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The grant will fund a study of bar coding technology and patient and employee safety, with emphasis on the impact of bar coding technology for medicine administration in pediatric hospitals, on medication errors, and on employee working conditions. The study involves collaboration among researchers at the UW-Madison, Medical College of Wisconsin, Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and Vanderbilt Children's Hospital.

Karsh also is part of a team including colleagues in the United Kingdom developing prospective hazard analysis methods for reducing medication errors. The study recently received $125,158 in funding from the United Kingdom Department of Health.

Andrew J. Miller (12K JPG)

Assistant Professor Andrew J. Miller has received a National Science Foundation grant of $202,888 to develop basic mixed-integer programming (MIP) methods. Miller will develop fundamental results to improve the performance of exact MIP algorithms designed for production planning problems and incorporate the results into MIP-based heuristics to optimize their performance on large practical problems. The theoretical results and heuristics developed will apply not only to broad families of production planning problems, but also to supply chain planning problems incorporating transportation and distribution as well as production decisions.

David Nembhard (23K JPG)

Associate Professor David Nembhard has been appointed to the editorial board of the Production and Operations Management Society Journal (POMS) Management of Technology Department. The publication is concerned with managing both the creation and application of rapidly changing technologies in an environment where the advent of new and improved technology is quickening the pace of globalization for many businesses and where new technologies have dramatically affected product and service attributes.

Professor Raj Veeramani has received a $600,000, two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to drive innovative plastics product development and enhance industrial competitiveness through technology transfer of new polymer materials, processes and tools. The work will also foster collaborative innovation networks in the plastics industry. Veeramani will lead the project along with co-PIs Professors Tim Osswald and Tom Turng, Dean Paul Peercy, and Assistant Dean Lawrence Casper.

Shiyu Zhou (23K JPG)

Assistant Professor Shiyu Zhou has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation. Under the three-year, $175,610 NSF award he will develop methods to describe and reduce variation in complicated manufacturing processes. With approximately $15,000 from SME, Zhou will monitor and diagnose surface defects in hot-rolling processes, applying advanced image processing and statistical analysis to images collected by an innovative imaging system.

David R. Zimmerman (14K JPG)

Professor David Zimmerman received a five year, $640,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to study ways to improve nurse retention rates and resident care in nursing homes. Under the grant, Center for Health Systems Research and Analysis (CHSRA) researchers will develop and implement a combined clinical and cultural model based on an interdisciplinary approach to resident care in which direct care workers have an enhanced role.

Zimmerman and CHSRA also have been awarded a two-year $266,756 contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services to help design and implement new investigative protocols and a decision support system for investigating complaints about nursing home quality of care.