Graduate Program

ISyE graduate student Anthony Roberts was named a Full Fellow of a national engineering organization.

Photo courtesy of Anthony Roberts Anthony Roberts, a second-year master’s student within ISyE’s Analytics Track, was chosen as a Full Fellow of The National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM).

GEM offers tuition coverage, a stipend, and professional development opportunities to under-represented students pursuing graduate degrees in engineering and science. Roberts’ fellowship will cover his entire two years at the University of Minnesota. As the first member in his family to earn a college degree, Roberts said he was “beyond elated” upon hearing the news of his selection.

“GEM has offered me tremendous opportunities,” says Roberts. “Not only do I get to attend graduate school, but also gain professional experiences thanks to the network of employer The pandemic provided an unexpected twist to ISyE PhD student Jiali Huang’s summer internship. Before the lockdown, she had been preparing to move to Seattle from June to August to work at Facebook as a Data Scientist Intern (Infrastructure Strategy). Instead of meeting her mentor, work partners, and managers in person—as she did at her summer internship with Lyft last year—Huang instead met them all virtually. Yet this disruption and distance didn’t stop her from taking on challenging projects for one of the world’s largest technology companies. “During my internship, I built discrete optimization models to explore the idea of Regional Block Placement for the Storage team, who manages the storage of Facebook’s data,” says Huang. Every other week, Huang would meet up with her mentor and two engineers in her partner team to provide each other progress updates as they worked toward their goal of improved data optimization. Being apart from her colleagues gave Huang an experience she hadn’t previously sponsors in GEM.”

When Roberts isn’t occupied with his graduate coursework, he’s working for MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that manages federally funded research and development centers operated by the U.S. government. At MITRE, Roberts recently transitioned from the position of High-Performance Computing Engineer to Health Systems Engineer. “I love MITRE,” Roberts says. “It’s filled with smart people and their mission is very noble.”

Outside of work and school, Roberts is active in professional organization, among them INFORMS, IISE, and the National Association of Black Engineers. Recently, he wrapped up a three-year term as alumni association board member for his alma mater, Northern Illinois

ISyE PhD student Jiali Huang made the most of her remote summer internship with Facebook, during which she managed to improve the company’s data storage system.

University. received during her in-person internship with Lyft. “Working proactively on projects and communicating effectively is extremely important during a remote internship,” she says. “On the positive side, I was able to focus more on my project and the improvement of my technical and communication skills.”

In the end, Huang says her project significantly increased Facebook’s data availability and balanced service times across the company’s data storage facilities. Doing so required extensive analysis with her team, including an examination of the availability and service time of data reading, while also factoring in operational needs, such as maintenance and unexpected failure events for Facebook’s many data warehouses. However, there were aspects of the in-person internship that Huang wishes had been possible. “I was not able to walk around the office, chatting with different people, and participating in various intern events,” says Huang, which together would have created a sense of company culture she missed.

Photo courtesy of Maher A. Lahmar

It was the late-90s and Maher A. Lahmar had just completed his Master’s in Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University in Turkey. After a period of contemplation, he started to seriously consider pursuing a PhD. It was one of Lahmar’s friends from America who encouraged him to consider the University of Minnesota. Although the cold weather intimidated Lahmar, it was the cordiality he immediately received from ISyE faculty that convinced him to move to Minnesota instead of attending another institution.

“When I came to the PhD program,” he says, “I had more of a manufacturing and production background.” But in the United States, Lahmar recognized the services industry was booming, which meant demand was growing for engineers capable of developing systems and solving domain-agnostic problems. Looking back, he believes the knowledge he gained as a PhD student equipped him to solve many of today’s problems.

“I worked on sequencing and scheduling problems,” Lahmar says. “The underlying mixed-integer and dynamic programming solution frameworks were generic enough to allow me to transfer those skills to problems I tackled [years later] at PROS and Target when solving pricing optimization problems” for the airlines

and retail industries. The same goes for Markov Decision Processes, which Lahmar explored as a PhD student and now uses as part of the Machine Learning models that assign advertiser accounts to the right service team in his current job at Google. Similarly, Lahmar says the elective graduate statistics courses he took at the University of Minnesota gave him the foundation to develop Regression and Bayesian time-series models that he uses now to measure business impact—a critical KPI in allocating resources within Google.

“These techniques that used to be limited in scope outside academia are now