~~ The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Presents

Professor Janet M. Twomey

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department Wichita State University

Topic: Industrial Engineering’s Role in Advancing Industrial Sustainability

Date: Thursday, April 3, 2014

Time: 10:30am to 11:30am (Refreshments from 10:00am to 10:30am)

Location: 406 Egan Center

Abstract: Sustainability as a topic of research has been around for at least 2 decades. The definition varies widely depending upon the domain of interest. In this talk, sustainability is interpreted as the application of ‘life-cycle’ thinking to a given domain. The speaker will first provide an overview of research in the application of life-cycle thinking performed by her and her colleagues at Wichita State University. Areas include wind energy and reliability, aircraft industry, and healthcare. A more in depth description of an ongoing project on the creation of a database for manufacturing life cycle information, the remaining challenges, and the role for industrial engineering in building a better information system will be provided. Finally, a vision for expanding on research themes at Northeastern University will be posed.

Bio: Dr. Janet Twomey is a Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, USA. She has been on the faculty of engineering Wichita State University since 1994. Dr. Twomey holds a Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, in Industrial Engineering. She also holds a BA in Sociology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. Her areas of expertise are in sustainable engineered systems, computational intelligence and statistics. She received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early CAREER award for her work in neural networks and sparse data sets. Dr. Twomey’s research funding totals over $5 mil. The majority of which has come from NSF and the Department of Energy for work in sustainable manufacturing, green wind energy, and sustainable healthcare. Dr. Twomey has co-authored over 70 peer reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. She was a Program Officer for Manufacturing Enterprise Systems at the National Science Foundation from 2001 to 2004. In 1999 she was an A.D. Welliver Boeing Faculty Summer Fellow. Currently she is the Academic Vice President for Board of Trustees, Institute of Industrial Engineering. Prior to obtaining a PhD in engineering, Dr. Twomey worked in a number of years in psychiatric research at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.