Industrial Engineering Adds Four Teaching, Research, and Visiting Faculty

Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS) is excited to welcome four new teaching, research, and visiting faculty. Along with the recently announced hiring of four tenure-track assistant professors, these additions will enhance the IEMS student experience and further the department’s research in machine learning and computational statistics.

Imon Banerjee 

Currently completing his PhD in statistics at Purdue University, Banerjee is joining the department as a research assistant professor and the IEMS Alumni Fellow. Banerjee, who received his bachelor of science and master of science in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, conducts research at the interface of stochastic operations research, statistics, and computer science. His research includes methods for statistically estimating the parameters of controlled Markov chains and of models in reinforcement learning, where the transition probabilities requiring estimation hinge on an agent’s actions. 

At Purdue, Banerjee served as a teaching assistant and taught courses, including an undergraduate course in probability. Banerjee received Purdue University’s Ross-Lynn Research Fellowship, and he represented the statistics department as a senator on the Purdue Graduate Student Government. 

Moses Chan 

Chan is coming aboard as an assistant professor of instruction, supporting the McCormick School of Engineering’s undergraduate program and minor in data science and engineering. Chan received his bachelor of science and master of science in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, where he also worked at the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety. He is finishing his doctoral dissertation in industrial engineering at Northwestern Engineering, which involves methods in high-dimensional statistics for analyzing large data sets in the physical sciences.

Chan was a multiple-time nominee, and the 2019 winner of, the IEMS Best Teaching Assistant Award for his work in the courses Statistics, Stochastic Models, and Qualitative Methods in Engineering Systems. He recently taught the undergraduate statistics course in IEMS. Chan received the 2018 Arthur P. Hurter Award, which recognizes an outstanding first-year IEMS doctoral student, as well as the IEMS Doctoral Leadership Award in 2020.

Somayeh Moazeni 

Moazeni joins IEMS as a visiting associate professor and the Patrick and Amy McCarter Fellow, on sabbatical from the Department of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Stevens Institute of Technology. After obtaining a BS and MS in mathematics from Amirkabir University of Technology, she earned a master of mathematics in combinatorics and optimization and a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo.

Moazeni has research expertise in optimizing sequential decisions under uncertainty via reinforcement learning, with applications in financial engineering and energy systems. She previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. She also served as a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and she was elected the vice chair of linear and conic optimization for the INFORMS Optimization Society.

Mike Watson 

Watson joins as an associate professor of instruction. He has a PhD in industrial engineering from Northwestern Engineering and has shared his experience in software, consulting, and startups as an adjunct professor in IEMS and Northwestern Engineering’s MS in Machine Learning and Data Science and Master of Engineering Management programs. His latest startup, where he was a cofounder and CEO, was a machine learning and optimization company that worked with Fortune 500 companies. The company grew to 140 employees and was successfully acquired. Following startup acquisitions, Watson has ended up at ILOG (CPLEX), IBM, LLamasoft, and Coupa Software.

Watson will teach the IEMS Client Project Challenge course, where student teams work with clients from leading companies and nonprofits on industry problems. He has coauthored two books, Supply Chain Network Design (2012 and 2017) and Managerial Analytics (2013), both originally published by Pearson Education, and in 2022 launched the “Mike Talks AI” blog.