This page provides information on some of the undergraduate projects I have supervised through Lehigh's independent-project course "Experimental Industrial Engineering" (IE 321).

My goal, when I supervise such projects (typically with seniors, in part because I have not yet taught sophomores/juniors so I only meet undergraduates at the beginning of their senior year when they take IE 316), is to find a topic of interest to both the student and me, which will allow the student to explore a field he/she is enthusiastic about and will allow me to convey important concepts that are more practice-oriented than what I can cover in a regular course and that I believe are valuable for tomorrow's workforce.

Here are some examples.

(Sara Ellis - Summer 2006, Ipek Ozkanoglu - Fall 2006)

This project was about seating subscribers at Zoellner Arts Center. It emphasized the amount of data available in practice, which required efficient computational techniques and heuristics, such as ranking subscribers (using for instance the number of years they have been subscribers, the number of shows they subscribe too...) before seating them. Sara developed an optimization model. Ipek designed a VBA-based tool that works in Excel.

Portfolio Management with Downside Risk

(Chris Barrett and Victoria Berenholz - Fall 2007, John Conner and Justin Panicker - Spring 2008)

The purpose of this project was to take a concept that has garnered much attention recently - the importance of minimizing downside risk rather than total risk (after all, upside risk is about things turning out better than expected - not something anyone would have much against!) - studying the practical feasibility of incorporating it into mathematical models and analyzing the difference in allocations compared to a model based on total risk. The students used Excel, AMPL and Matlab to perform their analysis. We are grateful to Morgan Stanley for providing some of the data.

Chris Barrett and Victoria Berenholz received third prize in Lehigh's Undergraduate Research Symposium for their work on this project.

Improving Yield of Merit Aid Offers

(Lisa Willard - Spring 2008)

This project analyzed data pertaining to acceptance and rejection of merit aid offers made by Lehigh University to potential first-year students. The large amount of data made the project akin to a consulting assignment, where the student had to make her own hypotheses about the main acceptance/rejection drivers and test them using statistical techniques. Details of analysis are confidential.