Faculty profile: Nilay Argon

Nilay Argon (24K JPG)

In Atlanta, there was only one Turkish restaurant and here there are three Turkish restaurants," comments Nilay Argon, who completed her PhD work in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech last year. She joined the department as an assistant professor in January.

Although Madison offered another draw — an international folk dance group she and her husband, Cenk, may join to perform dances from Eastern Europe and their native Turkey — what really attracted Argon was the chance to develop into a successful academic at what she calls one of the most scholarly, best U.S. universities.

Her research boils down industrial engineering to its essence: improving the effectiveness of workers, machines and manufacturing systems. Building on work she began with her PhD, Argon is applying stochastic, or random, processes models to production-flow lines.

There are many variables in such an environment, including workers, machines and even empty space, she says. "I'm trying to find ways to use those resources more efficiently," she says. She's trying to extract several flexibilities inherent to production lines — for example, cross-trained workers — to improve system efficiency. "When you have stability in your system, then it is possible to allocate those workers more efficiently so that the idle time of each worker would be minimized," she says. "Another useful flexibility might be that the order in which a product flows through a production line often can be varied."

Although she is extracting from her models managerial insights she hopes will benefit real-life systems, for now Argon is studying mainly the mathematical aspects of production-flow efficiency. She's always had both aptitude and interest in math — particularly in high school. "I was studying math courses all the time, giving less priority to history and the social sciences," she laughs.

With the help of her father, an electrical engineering professor in Turkey, Argon decided to build a career around her math skills and researched industrial engineering as a possible choice. "I saw that there are a lot of opportunities to apply math and a lot of interaction with people," she says. "I thought, 'That's the job for me.'"

She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. In addition to the PhD, she also received a master's degree in operations research from Georgia Tech in 2000.

Another of Argon's areas of interest involves applying statistical methods to analyze data generated from computer simulations of complex production systems. She uses a grocery-store checkout line as an analogy for a situation in which one variable depends on another. "I'm in the queue for a cashier and my waiting time in that queue depends on the waiting time of the customer before me," she says. "If he waits so long, I'm going to wait much longer. So there's a dependency between the output." Likewise, because one variable in a queuing system depends upon the outcome of another, it's difficult to statistically analyze simulation data, she says.

In fall Argon will teach a special-topics course to introduce others to her research, as well as an undergraduate course on probabilistic models and simulation. She still collaborates with colleagues both at Georgia Tech and in Turkey but looks forward to working with faculty and staff in engineering and business here.