MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
 here is nothing like summertime in Madison! Many of our students are away from campus, but they are still working hard, as evidenced by the fact that more than 50 percent of our students take summer internships with industry. Hundreds of companies come to campus each year to interview and select students to spend two to three months on site working under the supervision of professional engineers and managers. Students have taken internships with such firms as Intel Corporation, Cysco Systems, Harley Davidson Corporation and Kimberly Clark, and these internships provide our students with valuable exposure to the life of industrial engineering.
Faculty are also working hard in the summer. Most of our faculty members run large research programs that are funded by federal, industrial or private sources. They use these funds to spend intensive time during the summer working on their projects. Read the description of Associate Professor Ananth Krishnamurthy’s work in this newsletter to get a glimpse of one faculty member’s research program.
In other news, two groups led by ISyE faculty will form part of the core of the new Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. I will establish the Living Environments Laboratory, a physical laboratory and virtual reality chamber designed to accelerate development and production of personal care technologies. Professor Michael Ferris, Associate
Professor Jeff Linderoth, Assistant Professor Jim Luedtke, and Professor Steve Wright will create the Optimization Center, a computational resource that will provide advanced analytical support for bioinformatics and nanotechnology discoveries.
I would also like to say welcome to all MentorNet and LinkedIn members—by now you should have received the special ISyE message and be sure to look for subsequent exclusive messages at least once a quarter. We believe that these networks will help you stay especially informed about the new initiatives of the department.
Finally, it is my responsibility to let you know how we are faring in the current fiscal crisis. Like all parts of the campus, we have had to make cuts in both the number of positions and the total dollars available for instruction. I am happy to tell you that the department faculty have identified many creative strategies to manage this situation, and we are able to offer the same number of courses and teaching resources to our students.
Thus, although we have been faced with some belt-tightening, we are confident that we can achieve the department’s mission of producing the next generation of industrial engineers equipped with the knowledge that they’ll need to best serve industry and society.
We do hope you will plan to join us in the fall at Engineers’ Day on October 16 and at our Celebration for Dave Gustafson on November 7(Click here for more details).
Sincerely,
Patricia Flatley Brennan,
RN, PhD, Professor and Chair
3270 Mechanical Engineering Building
1513 University Ave.
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608/263-1315
Fax: 608/262-8454
E-mail: pbrennan@engr.wisc.edu
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