2015 Mary G. and Joseph Natrella Scholarship Awards

Will Guthrie, Natrella Scholarship Selection Committee Chair

The Quality and Productivity Section recently awarded two Mary G. and Joseph Natrella scholarships at the 2015 Quality and Productivity Research Conference, which was held June 10–12 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The 2015 honorees are Youngjun Choe, a PhD candidate in the department of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Keivan Sadeghzadeh, a PhD candidate in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Choe was recommended for the award by professors Vijay Nair and Eunshin Byon. His presentation at the conference was titled “Uncertainty Analysis for Importance Sampling Estimators with Stochastic Simulations.” Sadeghzadeh was recommended for the award by professors order ativan canada Nasser Fard and Beverly K. Jaeger. The title of his presentation was “Analytical Heuristic Decision-Making Methods for Complex High-Dimensional Failure Data Selection and Classification.”

The recipients were chosen for their outstanding teaching, community service, mentoring, leadership, scholarship, and commitment to the pursuit of quality improvement through the use of statistical methods.

The scholarships are funded from the ASA Natrella Scholarship Fund and Quality and Productivity Research Conference. Each Natrella Scholarship recipient gave a research presentation at the conference and received a $3,500 scholarship, plus $500 for travel expenses and complimentary registration for the conference and pre-conference short course.

Current members of the scholarship selection committee are Scott Kowalski, Minitab; Christina Mastrangelo, University of Washington; Sharad Prabhu, SAS; and Jolene Splett, National Institute of Standards and Technology.