University of Arizona Systems & Industrial Engineering

🎉DOCTORAL DEFENSE ANNOUNCEMENT🎉

Grid operators keeping the lights on during extreme weather, utilities deciding where to invest in solar and wind, manufacturers planning production months ahead — they all face the same challenge: making critical decisions today without knowing exactly what tomorrow holds.

Azadeh’s research develops new data-driven optimization methods to help decision-makers act reliably, efficiently, and equitably under uncertainty. Using chance-constrained, distributionally robust, and sample-based approaches, her work tackles real challenges in production planning, renewable energy, and power system operations — with computationally efficient methods that make advanced optimization practical at scale.

Her findings show that uncertainty can be built directly into decision-making without sacrificing efficiency, offering tools that improve reliability, cut costs, and support more resilient, sustainable, and equitable energy and manufacturing systems.

🎉DOCTORAL DEFENSE ANNOUNCEMENT🎉

Join us and Mohammad Ahmadi as he defends his dissertation: “Efficient Methods for Hierarchical Optimization Problems: Saddle Point, Misspecified, and Bilevel.”

How can we design fast, reliable algorithms for machine learning problems where one decision depends on the outcome of another? This structure shows up everywhere — from defending models against adversarial attacks and auto-tuning system settings, to balancing risk in financial portfolios and helping large language models “forget” sensitive information.

Mohammad’s research develops new algorithms for these layered decision problems that sidestep the heavy computations that usually slow them down, all while guaranteeing how fast they converge on a good solution. Tested on real machine learning tasks, his work offers a unified, dependable toolkit for the hierarchical optimization problems increasingly powering everyday technology.

🎉Join us and David Manford as he defends his dissertation: “Energy Prediction and Sustainable Decision-Making for Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing.”

How can we make additive manufacturing (3D printing) more sustainable — from individual makers to industrial shops? David’s research tackles this by combining predictive modeling, intervention design, user experiments, and life cycle assessment to forecast energy use and guide smarter, more sustainable decisions.

His findings offer practical guidance for makerspaces, businesses, industrial AM operations, and community 3D printing centers alike.

Dr. Ricardo Valerdi discusses how he supports UA athletics, the power of 9 in baseball, and how to make better decisions with his upcoming book, The Five Tool Team with Big 12 Conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wotGBk-pvvE

🇺🇸 Happy Fourth of July from the University of Arizona Systems & Industrial Engineering Department!

Wishing our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community a safe, fun, and happy Independence Day. ❤️🤍💙

The women of SIE are building, creating, and innovating their way through engineering — and we couldn't be prouder. 👩‍💻⚙️
From research labs to design studios, the women in our department — students, faculty, and alumnae alike — continue to push what's possible in this field forward.
A shout out to for building community and opportunity for the next generation of women engineers. 💪

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Hannah Budinoff, recipient of the inaugural 2025 SWE Tucson STEM Advocacy & Outreach Award! 🏆
This award honors a member of SWE Tucson who shows exceptional commitment to promoting STEM especially engineering through community outreach, advocacy, and visible leadership that broadens participation in the field.
We couldn't be prouder to see Dr. Budinoff recognized by .tucson for the impact she's made. Way to represent and !

👉 Swipe through to meet our Design Day 2026 award winners!

🏆 SIE students were recognized for their outstanding achievements at Design Day 2026!

From automation and mining optimization to sustainability, aerospace, healthcare, and advanced engineering solutions, our students earned recognition for their innovation, teamwork, and technical excellence.

Congratulations to all of our award winners—we are proud of your hard work and accomplishments! 🎉👏

Celebrating Freedom ❤️💛💚

Our faculty are making an impact far beyond the classroom!

Professor Furfaro's work in orbital mechanics, machine learning, and AI is helping build the tools needed to track and monitor the growing number of objects in space preventing collisions and protecting the satellites we rely on every day for communications, navigation, and national security.

What an incredible honor for our SIE community! 🐻💙❤️

Read the full story here: https://sie.engineering.arizona.edu/news-events/furfaro-joins-united-nations-outer-space-committee