Industrial Engineering Students Recognized With Department Awards

The Department of Industrial Engineering recognizes students each spring at the Annual Industrial Engineering Student Awards Banquet. This year, the banquet was changed to a ceremony and held virtually, as the coronavirus was still an issue.

Departmental Awards

The Outstanding Senior and Outstanding Graduate Student awards are intended to recognize the most outstanding Industrial Engineering undergraduate and graduate students who are graduating in calendar year 2021. The winners are selected by faculty vote on the basis of excellence in academic performance, leadership, service, collegiality, ethics and dedication. The Undergraduate Research Award and the Graduate Research Award are also selected by faculty vote and recognize the undergraduate and graduate students who made the most valuable contributions to departmental research efforts in calendar year 2020.

The honor of Outstanding Graduate Student for 2021 went to Nick Shallcross. Shallcross has demonstrated academic excellence during his time as a student, maintaining a 4.0 GPA while taking heavier-than-average course loads and completing a PhD in only three years. His research has provided significant contributions across several disciplines and is well known in the systems engineering technical community. He has many extracurricular activities, including being a member of the Graduate Dean's Student Advisory Board and Alpha Pi Mu. As a military officer during his time at the U of A, he has been a mentor for students in the Army ROTC department and has provided technical consultation for several military organizations. Following graduation, he will assume duties as analytical division chief at The Research and Analysis Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Shallcross is also the recipient of the 2020 Graduate Research Award. The Graduate Research Award is selected by faculty vote and recognizes the graduate student who made the most valuable contributions to departmental research efforts in calendar year 2020.

In his time at the U of A, Shallcross has received the General Omar N. Bradley Research Fellowship three times. He has used these scholarships, along with a scholarship presented by the Seth Bonder Foundation, to fund his research. Advised by Greg Parnell, director of the Operations Management Program, Shallcross' research has provided significant contributions across several disciplines focusing on the use of information theory, set-based design and model-based engineering to inform complex system design decisions.

He has presented this research at several professional conferences including multiple presentations at the Military Operations Research Society symposium, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, American Society for Engineering Management annual conferences and the Conference on Systems Engineering Research. The research has also contributed to several published and forthcoming papers advancing the theory and practices of set-based design, model-based engineering, program management and decision analysis. Shallcross plans to complete and defend his dissertation during summer 2021.

The Undergraduate Research Award is also selected by faculty vote and recognizes the undergraduate student who made the most valuable contributions to departmental research efforts in calendar year 2020. The recipient of the 2020 Undergraduate Research Award was Matthew Walters.

Walters has focused his research on developing a transportation routing model that allows for horizontal collaboration amongst manufacturers, 3PLs and distributors. Specifically, it benefits small to medium transportation providers that engage in shared trailer and warehouse usage to reduce miles driven and increase on-time delivery. He has applied skills in optimization and computer science to solve this research challenge. He will graduate with honors this year and his results are under consideration for presentation at the eighth International Physical Internet Conference to be held in June.

Maddy Suellentrop was recognized this year as the 2021 Outstanding Senior. Suellentrop has accumulated a tremendous number of accomplishments throughout her undergraduate studies. She has served as the Alpha Pi Mu president, served as Capstone project manager, won two nationally competitive IISE scholarships, won scholarships to study abroad in Sweden and received a research grant from the Honors College. She served as a First-Year Engineering Program Mentor, a Tau Beta Pi officer and student ambassador for the Office of Admissions. As a member of Kappa Delta sorority, she held five leadership positions, volunteered with Girl Scouts and was awarded the Scholastic Woman of the Month in 2018. She has maintained a 4.0 GPA despite this very demanding schedule and was recently named a U of A Senior of Significance. She completed two internships with Burns & McDonnell in Kansas City and will join them full time upon graduation. Suellentrop was also selected as the Outstanding College of Engineering Senior for 2021.

Industry-Sponsored Awards

Each year, the ArcBest Corporation sponsors the Outstanding Freshman Award. This award is presented to one first-year engineering student who has declared industrial engineering as a major and is selected by the faculty and staff of the First-Year Engineering Program.

Alex Hoge, manager of pricing and supply chain analytics at ArcBest, said, "A large part of why ArcBest has been able to keep up with the changes and stay ahead, can be traced back the Industrial Engineering program at the University of Arkansas. Some of the top innovators and key decision-makers in our company come from this department. This is a statement to the quality of students graduating from the department each year."

The 2021 ArcBest Outstanding Freshman Award goes to John Sooter.

Corporate sponsor Hytrol Conveyors presents the annual Hytrol Challenge Award, given each year to the best team in a competition in the Transportation Logistics or Facility Logistics course. This year, the competition is from a group project in Introduction to Transportation Logistics.

The team of Amie Beckwith, Courtney Johnston and Alyssa McKnight are the recipients of the Hytrol Challenge Award for 2021.

The students designed a set of vehicle routes to optimize over 250 customer deliveries. The vehicle routes were subject to limitations commonly observed in practice, including time windows for customer deliveries and drive and duty time restrictions for drivers. Their solution required the lowest total miles of all group submissions, plus they correctly analyzed the labor and equipment resource requirements associated with the set of recommended routes.

"We at Hytrol very much appreciate the opportunity to participate in today's ceremony. Hytrol has been fortunate to enjoy a strong, decades-long working relationship with the University of Arkansas, specifically with the College of Engineering. Over the past year, when so much emphasis being placed on supply chain and logistics during the pandemic, the importance of the research done at the University of Arkansas has taken on new importance," said Bob West, manager of academic partnerships at Hytrol. "Congratulations to the winning team. Thank you for your hard work and dedication, and all the best as you move forward."