A representative group of faculty and subject matter experts who have worked on projects along with their field of expertise is presented below:
Catherine Ridings – Associate Professor of Management
Drexel University -Ph.D. in Decision Sciences, M.B.A.
Catherine is the Director of the BIS program in the College of Business and Economics. She holds degrees in Decision Sciences with concentrations in Management Information Systems. Her dissertation, "Determinants of Trust and Use in Virtual Communities," won the Decision Sciences Institute's 2001 Elwood S. Buffa Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition. Prior to academia, she worked in industry for 8 years managing software developers building a large scale client-server customer contact application for Bell Atlantic (presently Verizon Corporation).
Robert Trent –Director of The Supply Chain Management Program and Management Department Chair
Michigan State University - Ph.D in Purchasing and Operations Management, BS in Materials Logistics Management; Wayne State University -MBA
Robert Trent is Director of the supply chain management program and Management Department Chair at Lehigh University. He holds a B.S. degree in materials logistics management, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in purchasing/operations management.
Prior to his return to academia, Professor Trent spent seven years with Chrysler Corporation. His industrial experience includes assignments in production scheduling, packaging engineering with responsibility for new part packaging set-up and the purchase of nonproductive materials, distribution planning, and operations management at the Boston regional parts distribution facility. He has also worked on numerous special industry projects.
Robert has been awarded the Class of 1961 Professorship, the Eugene Mercy Professorship, and the George N. Beckwith Professorship. He is also active with the ISM, serving for many years as the Professional Development Director of the NAPM of the Lehigh Valley. He recently served as a member of The APILS National Board of Directors. Bob and his family reside in Lopatcong Township, New Jersey.
John Spletzer – Associate Professor
University of Pennsylvania -PhD
John is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. John received an NSF Faculty Early CAREER Development Award to investigate smart wheelchair technologies for navigating urban environments. He teaches courses in mobile robotics and real-time image processing, and also serves as the instructor for both the Computer Science and Computer Engineering senior design courses. Before returning to school for his PhD, he worked as a test engineer for the U.S. Army.
Martha Dodge – Director of Energy Systems Engineering Institute
Lehigh University - BS in EE
Martha, formerly a senior administrator, retired from PPL Electric Utilities, where she led the electric planning and engineering department and was senior director within the Smart Grid initiative. She is now the director of the Energy Systems Engineering Institute (ESEI) at Lehigh University. She earned an MBA from Lehigh in 1988 and is a licensed professional engineer in Pennsylvania with 28 years of energy industry experience.
Robert Storer – Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology -PhD
Robert is the Co-Director of the Integrated Business and Engineering Honors Program. His research interests include heuristic optimization, logistics, scheduling and routing, combinatorial optimization, and “balancing and partitioning”. He teaches courses in heuristic optimization, simulation, and applied statistics.
George Wilson – Associate Chair, Associate Professor
Pennsylvania State University -PhD
George teaches courses in production control, operations research, stochastic processes, scheduling, and dynamic programming. His research interests are applied stochastic processes, optimization, production planning and control, modeling and analysis of logistic systems. He has been a member of the faculty since 1978.