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Bopaya Bidanda is currently a Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the faculty in 2021 after 21+ years as Department Chair. He also serves as Director of the Center for Industry Studies (which focuses on transdisciplinary research) and the Manufacturing Assistance Center initiative that helps underserved communities develop manufacturing skills.

His most recent book includes the Maynard Industrial & Systems Engineering Handbook, Sixth Edition, which serves as the definitive body of knowledge for industrial engineering. He is also the Past President of the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE), the largest and oldest professional society representing the discipline. Over the past 30 years, he served ABET as a Program Visitor, Accreditation Commissioner, Executive Committee member, and on the Board of Delegates, leading ABET teams to four continents.

Bidanda is also a triple Fulbrighter: first appointed in 2004 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist to Uruguay, more recently to India as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, and currently as a Fulbright Specialist in Sri Lanka.

He has received many international awards, most recently the Lilian Gilbreth Award by the Indian Institution of Industrial Engineering (IIIE) and the Frank & Lilian Gilbreth Award from IISE. These are the highest awards given by IE professional societies in the U.S. and India. He is an elected Fellow of IISE, SME, and ABET. Over the past decade, he has delivered keynote and plenary addresses at conferences in Brazil, Israel, Spain, Turkey, and India.

Most recently, he is actively engaged on the Business of Humanity project in Pittsburgh and India. His Manufacturing Assistance Center initiative (in operation since 1994) is now in Titusville, PA, with locations in Lagos (Nigeria) and Pauri Garhwal (India) becoming operational. The objective of these centers is to provide meaningful careers to the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, including convicted felons and homeless veterans.

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Rakesh Nagi is Head of Pillar and Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor, Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) and Director of the Aviation Studies Institute (ASI) at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He joined in August 2023. He is also Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as the Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC (2013-2019). He also served as the Interim Director of the Illinois Applied Research Institute (2016–2018). He is an affiliate faculty member in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory, Computational Science and Engineering, and Discovery Partners Initiative.

Previously, he served as the Chair (2006-2012) and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (1993-2013). He received his PhD (1991) and M.S. (1989) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, while he worked at the Institute for Systems Research and INRIA, France, and a B.E. (1987) degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Roorkee (now IIT-R), India.

He is a recipient of IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2022), INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2021, 2018), DARPA Graph Challenge Champion (2020), and numerous other awards including the NSF CAREER Award (1996). His papers have been published in journals including IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, Management Science, and Operations Research. Dr. Nagi's major research thrusts are in applied/military operations research and production/manufacturing systems. His research interests are in Big Graphs, High-level Information Fusion, Location theoretic approaches to Facilities Design, Production Management and Scheduling, Agile Manufacturing and Information-Based Manufacturing.

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Prof. Jitamitra Desai ('JD') is currently a Professor in the Decision Sciences Area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). Prof. Desai also serves as a Member of the Board of Governors of IIMB and Chairperson of the Global MBA program. Prior to these appointments, he has also held several leadership positions at IIMB, including being the Department Chair and Chairperson of the Supply Chain Management Center. Dr. Desai obtained his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, and his BTech degree is from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM).

Dr. Desai's research interests are primarily in the areas of optimization and analytics, with wide-ranging applications to engineering and management problems. He has been an invited speaker at several universities worldwide, including being invited by Harvard Business Publishing Education to talk on the challenges and opportunities of teaching and learning online. Prior to joining IIMB, he held faculty positions at Lehigh University (USA) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Dr. Desai has authored several refereed journal articles and book chapters and is actively involved in the analytics community. He was awarded the Nanyang Education Award (NTU, Singapore) and has received several research awards, including the “Best Paper Award: Operations Research Track” at the IISE Annual Conference.

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Dr. Sasanka Prabhala is an experienced researcher and drives user experience vision/strategy and applies user experience methodologies including ethnographic research, interaction design, and usability analysis to bring new products and services to markets. Dr. Prabhala is an expert on bridging the gap between the users and the technology. He regularly speaks and sits on the panel at conferences sharing consumer centric insights.

In 2013, he co-edited the book "Transforming Ethnography: User Experience Methods and Practices" and is a recipient of a patent for consumer electronics innovation. Dr. Prabhala received numerous awards for his work across business domains such as Aviation, Consumer Electronics, Healthcare, Higher Education, and Military. In 2017, Dr. Prabhala received the Affiliate Society Council of Dayton Outstanding Engineers & Scientists Award for technical leadership.

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Lizhi Wang is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University. Between 2007 and 2023, he worked at Iowa State University in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering as an assistant, associate, and then full professor. Between 2023 and summer of 2025, he worked at Oklahoma State University as the inaugural holder of the Ken and Lynn Case Endowed Chair position in the School of Industrial Engineering and Management.

His research interest is to solve real world problems using mathematical modeling and computational optimization. His recent research focus is to develop physiology-based and data-driven models for plants, animals, and human body.

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Dr. Guiping Hu is a Professor and Department Chair of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University. During 2023 – 2025, she served as the School Head of Industrial Engineering and Management at Oklahoma State University. During 2022-2023, she served as the Associate Chair of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University where she was a faculty from 2009-2023.

Dr. Hu’s research has been supported by NSF, USDA, DOE, and DOD with over $12M funding. She has published over 100 journal articles and 50 conference proceedings. She is an Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Fellow, ELATES fellow, and an NSF IAspire Leadership Academy Fellow.

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Ramayya Krishnan is the Dean Emeritus and W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an expert in data and decision analytics and digital transformation. He served as President of INFORMS in 2019 and helped lead the creation of its AI strategy.

He is an AAAS Fellow (section T), an INFORMS Fellow, and an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration. He chaired the AI futures Committee of the National AI Advisory Committee to the President and the White House office of AI Initiatives office and is chair of the DOD’s RAI academic council. He directs the CMU-NIST cooperative research center on AI measurement science and engineering.

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Dr. Subhashini Ganapathy is the dean of the School of Graduate Studies and vice provost for research and innovation at Wright State University. Dr. Ganapathy joined Wright State in the College of Engineering and Computer Science in 2011 and has held numerous leadership positions.

Dr. Ganapathy’s research focuses on integrating technology to improve human performance, health and wellness, design thinking, user-experience assessment, and human factors engineering. Prior to this, she was a user experience researcher at Intel Corporation for six years, where she was responsible for research and development activities to improve user experience for Intel's next generation of products and platforms.

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Vasanthan (Vasa) Dasan recently retired as Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product Development and Software Engineering at ProStar, a utility locating software company. At ProStar, he led the global development and deployment of the PointMan solution and guided the company through its IPO on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV). Before joining ProStar, Vasa was Vice President of Engineering at Symplified, a security startup later acquired by Dell. He also served as founding Chief Technology Officer at Wayin, a mobile and social media platform founded by Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun) and acquired by Cheetah Digital.

Earlier in his career, Vasa spent 17 years at Sun Microsystems, where he was Chief Technologist for the Cloud Computing Practice and a Distinguished Engineer in the $5.1 billion SunService division and helped develop the widely adopted Solaris operating system.

Vasa holds a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Peradeniya and dual master’s degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bowling Green State University. He pursued Ph.D. studies in Computer Science at Colorado State University, where his research contributed to Hewlett-Packard’s SoftBench product. Vasa served as Adjunct Faculty in Computer Science and Engineering departments at the University of Colorado Boulder. Vasa is the sole inventor of U.S. Patent 5,761,662—the foundational patent for the Google news and Facebook newsfeeds—and the author of the Prentice Hall book Hands-On Intranet.

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Patrick McNamara, Ph.D., serves as Executive Director of the United States-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission. He has worked with universities, governments, corporations, nonprofits, and foundations for over 40 years. Before joining Fulbright Sri Lanka, Patrick was at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he taught conflict resolution, sustainable development, and social entrepreneurship.

Other experience includes Director of Philanthropic Services at Omaha Community Foundation which annually donated over $80 million to nonprofits; Director of Omaha Hate Crimes Project, a partnership funded by the U.S. Department of Justice; Founding Partner of a consulting practice; managing a printing ink manufacturing company; and litigation paralegal at a Wall Street law firm. He is on the governing board of Initiatives of Change, a global interfaith NGO “building trust across the world’s divides.” Patrick’s TED Talk is "Water Conflict, Water Peace."

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Jeevan Gnanam strives to be an entrepreneurial idea generator like his grandfather, the late Mr. A. Y. S Gnanam, founder of St. Anthony’s Group (SA Group). SA Group is one of the oldest and largest conglomerates which pioneered industrialization in Sri Lanka by manufacturing textiles, building materials, plastic products, industrial fasteners, cement, fiber cement and corrugated roofing sheets.

Jeevan is the visionary behind Sri Lanka’s first operational IT Park – Orion City, home to some of the world’s leading IT firms. Jeevan is a founder member of the Lanka Angel Network, which targets Sri Lankan entrepreneurs and companies and helps them to grow by providing venture capital and mentorship. With his wife Brindha, he co-founded Hatch Works, the leading start-up hub in Sri Lanka with branches in Colombo, Jaffna, and Kandy.

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Dr. Pratap Kumar is a clinician, neuroscientist, health economist and entrepreneur working at the interface of technology, health sciences and healthcare markets. His work focuses on combining innovative technologies, clinical processes and business models to improve healthcare delivery in low-resource settings.

Dr. Kumar has a medical degree and MPhil in Neurophysiology from India, a PhD in Neuroinformatics from the University/ETH Zurich, and an MSc in International Health Policy (Health Economics) from the London School of Economics. He moved to Kenya in 2012 and founded Health-E-Net Limited, a social enterprise working on sustainable data on primary healthcare in low-resource settings.

He is a Senior Research Fellow in Strathmore University Business School in Nairobi, where he studies innovation and entrepreneurship in global health. He is currently the PI of a BLOODSAFE grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the US National Institutes of Health. The 6-year, multi-county project focuses on innovations to improve access to safe blood for transfusion in Kenya.

Dr. Kumar has won various awards and grants including a ‘Stars in Global Health’ award from Grand Challenges Canada to deliver remote medical services in underserved regions, and the 2018 Global Health Innovation Prize for “PaperEMR”, a novel approach to capture routine health information directly from paper using machine learning and computer vision on browser-based platforms. He is currently Associate Professor in Digital Health Policy at the Global Business School for Health in UCL, working on frameworks for sustainable innovation in global health.

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Prof. Daniela Popescu is the Vice Rector of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and General Secretary of the International Foundation for Production Research. As Vice Rector, she is responsible for overseeing university leadership, including institutional management, strategic engagement with European funding programs, and strengthening relationships with industry partners, alumni, community stakeholders, and the university’s four subsidiaries.

In her academic role, she teaches courses in CAD/CAM/CAE, Digital Production, and the modeling and simulation of production systems. Her research focuses on Digital Production, the digitization and digitalisation of cultural heritage, digital transformation, and the application of artificial intelligence in manufacturing.

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Rema Padman is Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Veterans Affairs, and several foundations to investigate predictive, prescriptive and generative analytics, informatics and operations for data-driven decision support in the context of clinical and consumer-facing IT interventions in healthcare delivery and management.

More recently, she has also been focusing on AI-ML-OR approaches for investigating patient safety issues and for addressing health literacy challenges. She is a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT/Kanpur, an elected Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Inaugural Recipient of the Bufalini Prize in Italy for applications of AI in Medicine.

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Sunderesh S. Heragu is a Regents Professor and holds the John Hendrix Chair at Oklahoma State University (OSU). Dr. Heragu is President of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and a senior member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He is author of the 5th edition of Facilities Design and co-editor of Operations, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management. Dr. Heragu is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), and the World Academy of Productivity Sciences (WAPS).

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Nathan M. Kathir, Ph.D., P.E., F. ASCE, is currently a professor and the Director of Senior Projects in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at George Mason University. Previously he worked in the industry and for the U.S. Government in which his experience includes working for the Dept. of Defense and the White House. He has been an active member of ABET, ASCE and ASEE. He was a member of the Executive Committee of Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET until July 2025. He obtained his B.S. in civil engineering from Peradeniya and PhD from Texas A&M.

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Dr. AlMaian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at Kuwait University. Her research focuses on engineering management, organizational learning and knowledge management, and risk management. Prior to her academic career, Dr. AlMaian completed a specialized training program for engineers and spent four years in the industry working for a financial institution. Her work aims to advance understanding and practices in engineering management and organizational knowledge systems.

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Dr. Amani Bu-Qammaz is an Associate Professor at the Civil Engineering Department- College of Engineering and Petroleum/ Kuwait University. She is a former Minister of Public Works, former Minister of Electricity and Water and Renewable Energy in Kuwait, and former Board Member of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS).

She was the director of the Kuwait Engineer Girls (KEG) program between 2017-2022, a young female engineers empowerment training program established in 2017. KEG trained around 200 female engineers from all engineering disciplines. The main research focus is promoting risk management awareness in the construction industry in Kuwait, particularly in international construction projects.

Full Biography:

• Distinguished Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, The University of Illinois at Chicago
• Director, Microphysics Laboratory, UIC
• Adjunct Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIC
• Honors College Faculty, UIC
• Founder and Chairman of Sivananthan Laboratories, Inc.
• CEO and Chairman of EPIR Technologies, Inc.
• Co-founder of InSPIRE
• Chairman of Episolar, Inc.; Chairman of Episensors, Inc.
• B.Sc., Physics (1980) University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
• Ph.D., Physics (1988) The University of Illinois at Chicago

Prof. Sivalingam Sivananthan is an entrepreneur and professor who pioneered semiconductor technology used in night vision sensors that provide critical protection for military troops and national security. He is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Director of the Microphysics Laboratory at UIC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Honors College Faculty at UIC. Prof. Sivananthan was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2013 for his efforts as an immigrant innovator and entrepreneur to create jobs, grow the economy and make the country more competitive in the world.

Prof. Sivananthan is the Founder and Chairman of Sivananthan Laboratories, Inc., a high tech business incubator focused on promoting economic growth through fostering cutting-edge, fundamental research and development. He is the CEO and Chairman of EPIR Technologies, Inc., which provides advanced infrared materials and sensors for military and commercial applications. His work in creating advanced photovoltaic technology for night vision sensors has also served as the platform for groundbreaking, next generation solar cells. Prof. Sivananthan has also founded a number of other technology companies including Episolar Inc., and Episensors, Inc.

Additionally, he co-founded InSPIRE (the Institute for Solar Photovoltaic Innovation, Research, and Edu-training), a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote research, development, workforce training, and technology commercialization within the solar energy industry. InSPIRE works with veterans and university chapters to provide hands-on solar and renewable energy training and educational programs for young students in disadvantaged communities.

Over the course of his academic career, Prof. Sivananthan has advised many graduate students and has served on a large number of Ph.D. and M.S. thesis committees. He has over 30 years of experience in MBE semiconductor growth kinematics and characterization, and he is recognized as a leading authority in the field of II-VI based optoelectronic devices. He has presented over 250 refereed publications in the field of II-VI semiconductor research and development. Among his numerous honors and awards, he received the “Friends of the Night, Conquest of Darkness" award from the U.S. Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate in 2005. He was named an “Outstanding American by Choice” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2013, and recognized by Crain's as among Chicago’s top ‘50 people in technology you should know’. Prof. Sivananthan is an SPIE Fellow and an APS Fellow.