IEOR Recognizes Outstanding Achievement At Commencement Awards Ceremony

May 16, 2016 / Eugene Pang

Today, UC Berkeley’s Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research recognized undergraduate and graduate students at the commencement reception held at Doe Library Upper Terrace. Eleven awards were given to twenty-five students to honor exceptional academic achievement and leadership this year.

Undergraduate awards

1. Undergraduate Faculty Award – The undergraduate faculty award was established to recognize excellence within the IEOR major.

  • Riley Murray

2. ​Outstanding ORMS Student – The Outstanding ORMS award was established in 2014 to recognize excellence among students within the Operations Research & Management Science (ORMS) major.

  • Linnan Zheng.

3. Alpha Pi Mu Award – Alpha Pi Mu is the only nationally accepted industrial Engineering honor society. Its purpose is to confer recognition upon students of industrial engineering who have shown exceptional academic interest and ability in their field, to encourage the advancement and quality of industrial engineering education, and to unify the student body of the Industrial Engineering Department at Cal in presenting its needs and ideals to the faculty.  The department recognized the current officers for their work to lead the Alpha Pi Mu chapter at Cal:

  • Aaron Prohofsky – President
  • Bowen Ni – Vice President
  • Mehran Navabi – Treasurer
  • Wesley Jin – Secretary
  • Cesar Garza – Recruitment Officer
  • Katie Mak – Event Organization

4. Institute of Industrial Engineers Award  – IIE is the world’s largest professional organization supporting individuals involved with industrial engineering.  Founded in 1948, it links over 15,000 members from 280 chapters and offers publications as well as educational, professional development, and training programs to foster advancement in the field.  The department recognized the current officers for their work to lead the IIE chapter at Cal:

  • Yirong Fan – President  (Pictured center)
  • Elisa Ramirez – Vice President
  • Albert Chandra – Finance Chair  (Pictured right)
  • Jerry Cortez – Corporate Chair
  • Sherry Zhang – Technology Chair
  • Waverly Runion – Social Chair

5. Jengyee Prize – The Jengyee Prize was established to honor Jengyee Liang, a student who received a degree from IEOR in 2005 and had a passion for working to make the world a better place. Jengyee tragically passed away in 2008, but the department works to keep her memory alive by recognizing one student each year who shares the passion Jengyee had for improving the world.

This year the department presented the Jengyee Prize to Srushti Vora. Srushti is a junior majoring in ORMS, South Asian Studies and minoring in Bioengineering.  She is extremely passionate about creating accessible, efficient, and sustainable health care for everyone — especially those living in rural areas.

Before coming to Cal, Shrushi co-founded three telemedicine healthcare ventures in her native India. The first, Express ECG, provides quick and affordable electrocardiograms remotely and is now available at 20 locations in western India. The second, Express Diagnostics, receive and analyze medical tests via remote diagnostic technologies to provide accessibility and care for those in isolated areas and the third, MedicoDB, aims to create a fully integrated medical database for patients, doctors, and hospitals to store medical records.

On every school break since 2010, Srushti has also served as an intern for the Life Care Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, a 24-hour emergency center and hospital in India.

At Cal, she is currently the Vice President of Communications for Berkeley Women in Business and last year served as the chair of events for the International Student Association at Berkeley.

  • Srushti Vora

6. Departmental Citation – – The Department Citation Award is the highest undergraduate honor given to one student in each engineering department each year. These awards are given by departments in recognition of distinguished work and academic accomplishment.

  • Jessica Wijaya

Graduate Awards

1. MEng Intellectual Contribution Award – The MEng Intellectual Contribution Award is given to the student voted as contributing positively to the M.Eng. cohort’s learning experience both inside and out of the classroom. Nominations were voted on by the entire class. Here are a couple of quotes about this year’s winner:

“Chong Wee is very experienced in algorithm development, and codes well. Besides the huge contributions he made to our project, he is also patient to answer our questions and helped us to finish our tasks. IEOR242 became my favorite class partially because of him. He is definitely a helpful friend and good teacher.”

“Chong Wee has a track record of demonstrating polished level of analysis and pioneering significant aspects of data analytics. He has also one of the most responsible, respectful, and helpful classmates that I have encountered in the M.Eng.”

  • Chong Wee Tan

2. The Katta G. Murty Prize – The Katta G. Murty prize rewards the winner of an annual competition for an IEOR graduate student with the best paper on optimization based on original work of the author.  The winner is chosen by a Judging Committee of IEOR faculty whose specialization is optimization, who select the best entry among all submissions.  The Katta G. Murty Prize was established in 2006 with a gift from Katta Murty to provide an annual prize for graduate students in the IEOR department at UC Berkeley.  This year two outstanding students are sharing the prize. The first student is Morteza Ashraphijuo for his paper titled “A Strong Semidefinite Programming Relaxation of the Unit Commitment Problem.”  The second student is Auyon Siddiq for his paper titled “Inverse Optimizatoin with Noisy Data.”

  • Morteza Ashraphijuo
  • Auyon Siddiq

3. Outstanding GSI Awards – The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award gives campus wide recognition to excellence in teaching by Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). The recipients are chosen for their outstanding work in the teaching of undergraduates.  Nominees are chosen based upon their teaching scores and their overall effectiveness as an instructor. This year the department recognized four outstanding GSIs:

  • Carlos Deck (pictured)
  • Kevin Li
  • Rebecca Sarto Basso (pictured)
  • Quico Spaen (pictured)

4. IEOR First Year Faculty Fellowship Award – The IEOR First Year Faculty Fellowship rewards excellence among first year graduate students. The department recognized one student this year for his outstanding overall work.

  • Arman Jabbari

5. IEOR Faculty Fellowship  – The IEOR Faculty Fellowship is the highest graduate student award in the department.  This award is given each year to recognize one student for their overall academic excellence and leadership.

  • Quico Spaen
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Eugene Pang