Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech

Congratulations to the 32 ISyE Senior Design teams (including one Create-X team), who proudly represented our School at the Georgia Tech Capstone Design Expo!
ISyE brought more teams than any other School at the expo, a testament to the talent, dedication, and impact of our students. Special congratulations to our School winner, “Contact Point.” The team earned a $1,500 prize.
“Contact Point” redesigned Elevate Soultions Group’s contact lens tray-loading process from the ground up, replacing a four-to-six-person manual operation with a single worker, a custom workstation, and purpose-built software.
Well done to all participating teams! We look forward to continuing to celebrate your accomplishments and learning more about your project experiences. Read more at the link in our bio.

Congratulations to George Fellow and Bonder Scholar Che-Yi Liao on successfully defending his thesis: “Operationalization of AI Systems Through Data-Centric Design.”
A machine learning PhD Student, Liao’s research explores how data‑centric design can help AI systems remain reliable and effective in real‑world decision environments. By integrating prediction, optimization, and action across applications in public health, personalized medicine, and foundational data science, his work reframes AI deployment to address issues such as local data limitations and delayed reporting.
Liao’s thesis committee consisted of:
Professor Kamran Paynabar (Advisor)
Assistant Professor Gian-Gabriel Garcia (Advisor)
Professor Yao Xie
Professor Jing Li
Assistant Professor Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh

Everyone was a winner, but some of us took home the trophy!
Members of the ISyE family came together for the “Game Show Battle” Staff Appreciation Day. The event was a great opportunity to connect with new team members, strengthen collaboration across our department, and align on ways to better support the ISyE community. We also received updates on our new home, George Tower!
Thank you to all the staff members who helped make the day a success. We look forward to joining the College of Engineering community on May 14th for the “Buzz Thru The 90’s” Staff Appreciation Day.

🌍 Rwanda Study Abroad Program Spotlight

Founded by ISyEs Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and Professor Valerie Thomas in 2020, the Rwanda Study Abroad program continues to grow, reaching its largest cohort yet this year. Now co‑led by Tony Giarrusso (City and Regional Planning) and Chris Ippolito (Modern Languages), the program reflects a truly interdisciplinary approach to sustainable development education.

While the experience has primarily served undergraduate students, this year marks an exciting expansion with the addition of a concurrent graduate opportunity: the MBA International Practicum at the Scheller College of Business, initiated by Michael Oxman.

Pictured here is the 2026 combined cohort during a visit to the Rwanda Energy Group, engaging firsthand with leaders and organizations shaping energy and development solutions on the ground.

Senior Design team I Like Big Boxes and I Cannot Lie is working with DHL eCommerce to adapt to changing package profiles flowing throw their network. Larger and heavier packages are increasingly common, which has resulted in lower throughput, more frequent machine downtime, and larger staging areas. The team is looking for improvements to their standard operating procedure that will help them keep up with demand.

The team’s approach is centered around modifying the order that packages are fed to the sorting system, to reduce periods of backlog and starvation and yield a more consistent throughput. This will make use of existing machinery in a more efficient manner, helping DHL accommodate the new, larger packages.

Team Members:
🐝 Annika Beach
🐝 Anita Di Bari
🐝 Ansley Hails
🐝 Ezra Mahle
🐝 Andrew Pietkiewicz
🐝 Rohit Ramanujam
🐝 Elizabeth Shipley
🐝 Brandy Weiss

Senior Design team Lean on Me is partnering with Georgia Tech’s Academic Success & Advising (ASA) unit to develop a data-driven operational analytics framework built on Navigate360 appointment data. The objective of the project is to strengthen ASA’s ability to scale advising services in response to growing enrollment, while improving access, equity, and overall student support.

By integrating demand forecasting, no-show risk modeling, and operational dashboards, our approach enables ASA to move from reactive scheduling to proactive planning. The desired impact is twofold: improving advisor workload balance and resource allocation and ultimately enhancing student academic success through more timely and reliable access to advising services.

Team Members:
🐝 Shivani Murugapiran
🐝 Surya Rangaswami
🐝 Julianne Latimer
🐝 Wyatt Stephens
🐝 Annie Dang
🐝 Ansley Nguyen
🐝 Josh Rauf
🐝 Noah Koh

Senior Design team Home Game Heroes is building on the forecasting, optimization models, and dashboards developed by a previous Senior Design team for the Atlanta Braves. That system generated an optimal promotion schedule (e.g., bobbleheads, t-shirts, etc.) for a given baseball season.

The primary objective of continuing this work is twofold. First, this system must become easily usable. This means integrating directly with the Braves’ database and presenting insights through planning-aligned dashboards. A planning-aligned dashboard is one that answers the questions the Braves already ask during promotion planning, without requiring additional manual analysis. For example, a simple implementation of a “letter grade” metric would convey the performance of a promotion. The focus is on making the system easy for the Braves team to digitally incorporate into their workflow and confidently use it for decision-making.

Second, the project strengthens the technical components of the model. Rather than optimizing only ticket revenue, the system expands to optimize total revenue - including tickets, food & beverage, and merchandise.

By combining improved usability with a more holistic revenue framework, the Braves are positioned to make promotion decisions more easily and increase overall revenue impact. To evaluate this impact, the team will conduct a dry run of the 2026 season and compare projected revenue under the optimized schedule to the revenue projected from the original November plan.

Team Members:
🐝 Nadia Bozeman
🐝 Joshua Canlas
🐝 John Cellitti
🐝 Vivian Chung
🐝 Sarah Copeland
🐝 Katie Hamfeldt
🐝 Avinash Harista
🐝 Curran Mitra

Senior Design team Trayformers, is collaborating with GradyHealth System, a major healthcare provider serving metro Atlanta. The team’s objective is to map and analyze Grady’s current tray-based workflow and to develop a data-driven process improvement plan, along with a simple decision-support tool.

Their goal is to reduce delays, errors, and rework from preparation through delivery, resulting in more reliable service for patients and staff, reduced waste and operational friction, and measurable savings in time and cost.

Team Members:
🐝 Shadia Lopez
🐝 Claudia Auffant
🐝 Patrick Calderon-Schuler
🐝 Shela Dayan
🐝 Tiffany Jensen
🐝 Manuel Nieto
🐝 Celina Noltenius
🐝 Taylor Oubs

Senior Design team Green Acres is working with Kenzie Lane Innovation, an Atlanta-based investment firm that owns and manages a large property in Madison, GA, as part of its long-term real estate portfolio.

The team is looking to provide two data-driven systems to support the company’s strategic and operational decisions. The land-use allocation system will help determine how the property's acreage should be divided across different land-uses to reduce the property’s net loss, align with the client’s preferences, and guide future planning. The operations system will focus on storage location, equipment movement, road use, and labor productivity for greater efficiency across day-to-day activities.

Team Members:
🐝 Ronny Berry
🐝 McKenna Hwang
🐝 Marc Mueller
🐝 Eric Pak
🐝 Brady Rackley IV
🐝 Wyatt Smith
🐝 Walton Wade

Senior Design team Buzz on the Beach is working with VayKLife to reduce the total usage of transportation resources, including a reduction in the number of trucks used, miles and labor hours, fuel consumption, and peak season rental dependency. By creating routes that respect inventory and capacity constraints, their system can maintain the same level of service with fewer resources required.

Improving these routes will increase efficiency and eliminate the need for territory managers to manually adjust routes on a daily basis. While the proposed routing solution focuses on the Charleston, SC region, it has been designed and deemed by the client to be scalable across all 14 VayKLife locations due to standardized operations.

These improvements position VayKLife to make more informed operational decisions as the model continues to be refined.

Team Members:
🐝 Chance O’Donnell
🐝 Jessa Brown
🐝 Lilly Aabye
🐝 Lucy Fantz
🐝 Rohan Prabhuram
🐝 Tyler Estridge
🐝 Will Craycraft