MIE’s Ana Muriel Receives 2024 IISE Transactions Service Award

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Associate Professor Ana Muriel of the UMass Amherst Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department is one of four recipients of the 2024 IISE Transactions Service Award, as presented by the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) for her service as an associate editor at IISE Transactions, the organization’s flagship journal for the field of industrial and systems engineering. According to the IISE, the award “recognizes and rewards the quality work and dedication of department editors and associate editors at IISE Transactions.” Most recently, Muriel has been serving as an associate editor for the Supply Chain and Logistics Department of the journal.

Distinguished Professor of MIE Erin Baker, who is also the faculty director of the UMass Amherst Energy Transition Institute, received this same award in 2023 for her role as associate editor of the Operations Engineering and Analytics Department at IISE Transactions.

“As the flagship journal of the IISE,” explains the organization’s website, “IISE Transactions publishes original, high-quality papers on a wide range of topics of interest to industrial engineers who want to remain current with the state-of-the-art technologies.” 

The IISE goes on to say that “The refereed journal aims to foster the engineering community by publishing papers with a strong methodological focus motivated by real problems that impact engineering practice and research. Published monthly, the journal is composed of four focus issues: Design and Manufacturing; Operations Engineering and Analytics; Data Science, Quality and Reliability; and Supply Chain and Logistics.”

The IISE presented the award to Muriel at its Annual Conference & Expo in Montreal this May. At that same conference, the IISE also gave Muriel and her student, Kelvin Ekun, the Best Paper Award in the Modeling and Simulation Track for their paper “Online Lead Time Quotation Under Contingency,” which came with a $750 prize.

Muriel also serves as the MIE associate department head and the director of MIE’s Engineering Management Program. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the MIE’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) Research Group. As she explains, “Within the broad and rapidly evolving field of SCM, our group focusses on analyzing and modeling the coordination of production, inventory, distribution, and pricing policies of the supply network.”

Muriel adds that “SCM takes a holistic approach towards managing the flow of material and information throughout the supply network – including different tiers of suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, and stores – in order to maximize system-wide profits and create customer value.”

As Muriel summarizes the real-world backdrop for the research being carried out by her group, “We are in an unprecedented era of technical innovation and change. Vast amounts of data are collected, tracking every move in a supply chain, every patient seen in a healthcare setting, every mile flown by a jet engine. Computing and machine-learning power continue to increase, making it possible to drive insights and knowledge from these data.”

Accordingly, says Muriel, “The mission of the SCM Lab is to advance the basic science and develop the practical tools necessary to equip industry with data-driven, decision-support systems that use the data to create high-performing processes that save time and cost, create a better customer or patient experience, and/or reduce risk.” 

Muriel earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University, and she received her B.S. in Mathematics with a concentration in Statistics and Operations Research from the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. (July 2024)