IISE Member Spotlight

Meet Siqian Shen

Associate Professor
Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering
University of Michigan

Notable accomplishments

Shen recently wrote a report outlining possible solutions to the COVID-19 crisis in operations models used in the retail sector. Read it here.

What made you want to join IISE? What are some of the advantages of membership?

"I joined when I was a student, and I've made a lot of friends through IISE conferences and ... we've grown together. We found jobs in universities and still stay connected with each other, write papers together. I think that bond is so important. It bonds you with people who have similar interests."

What are some of the accomplishments you're most proud of and why?

"So far, I have graduated six Ph.D. students, and I'm advising five of them now. I'm proud of the work we've done together. The most important thing is ... you have someone who is actually out there using the things they learned that you passed to them, and they're educating other people. A lot of them are working in industry right now and one of them is a professor. They're solving systems engineering problems on a daily basis, even more than I do. We exchange emails and stay in touch ... they've made me very proud."

Any advice for young industrial and systems engineers?

"Go out and look for interesting problems ... (you) are young and have the power to think about very big problems. There are many ways ... to keep aware of what's going on in the world and connect that with systems engineering tools."