Educator

After completing my BA in math at Swarthmore College and my PhD in industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California-Berkeley, I worked for 40 years as a researcher, professor, and department chair at Purdue University, the Ohio State University, and Colorado State University-Pueblo, teaching over 1000 students in classes, serving as committee chair for about 100 MS students, and supervising 5 PhD graduates. I have received teaching, research, and service awards from Purdue, Ohio State, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the Institute for Industrial and Systems Engineering. I served on the Board of Directors of ASEE and, starting in July 2019, I am on the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET.

I believe in students. My job is to help students enunciate and achieve educational goals. I never (well, very rarely) tell a student that a goal is not achievable (and most of those students proved me wrong). I set high standards and then I will do almost anything to help students meet those standards.

I love to teach. Designing and delivering an engaging and effective learning experience for students is a deeply intellectual and satisfying task. With only one opportunity per year to experiment on a specific topic, improvements must be carefully thought out. If the students largely fail to learn a topic I taught, I take responsibility for that failure.

I use technology to teach. I keep all course material on a Trello board. I use screen-cast-o-matic to create how-to videos for the software (mostly Minitab). I use a LiveScribe pen to create Pencasts explaining how to do example problems. I have students work in teams during class posting their results on Trello and then explaining to the rest of the class.

I write Open Educational Resource textbooks (with a Creative Commons license). See www.introtoie.com for my Introduction to Industrial Engineering textbook. My probability, statistics, and Six Sigma textbook still needs some work before I make it public. I used two sabbaticals to write these books.