As part of our summer panel series, we were honored to invite four lab alumni back (virtually) to IDEAL. The panel discussed their experiences during and after their Ph.D. or postdoctoral positions at IDEAL, imparting our current members and summer interns with words of advice and encouragement. The panelists were:
- Prof. Harrison Kim (Postdoc, 2003-2004): Professor, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and Willett Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); director of the Enterprise Systems Optimization Laboratory as well as the Hoeft Tech and Management Program at UIUC. Prof. Kim has received numerous awards and researches engineering design, analytics, and systems optimization.
- Dr. Zhen Jiang (Ph.D., 2015): Lead Analytics Scientist / Analytics Supervisor, Ford Innovation Center, Palo Alto, CA. Zhen’s dissertation was Model Uncertainty Quantification and Uncertainty Reduction in Simulation-Based Systems Design (co-advised by Prof. Dan Apley).
- Dr. Mingxian Wang (Ph.D., 2016): Research Scientist, Amazon Boston. In the Alexa Entertainment Spoken Language Understanding team, Mingxian researches Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). She previously worked as a Data Scientist at Ford’s Global Data, Insight & Analytics organization, where she led the research collaboration between Ford and Northwestern University.
- Dr. Xiaolin Li (Ph.D., 2018): Software Engineer, Microsoft, WA. Xiaolin’s dissertation was Interphase Modeling and Data Analytical Approaches for Polymer Nanocomposites Design (co-advised by Prof. Cate Brinson).
It was impressive to learn how their time with Prof. Wei Chen has helped them reach success in each of their careers since leaving IDEAL! Please enjoy our Zoom group photo below.
