This post is a professional update. As of September 1st, I will be a full-time Associate Professor of Instruction in Northwestern’s IEMS (Industrial Engineering and Management Science) program.1
This is a new chapter for me.
I’ve always loved teaching. I taught as an adjunct professor at Northwestern since 1999— through three kids, always having a full-time job, travel, two start-ups, and four acquisitions. But, as an adjunct with a full-time job, I never had the full faculty experience. Now I will get that experience.
I’m excited for this opportunity. In addition to teaching and helping the department, here are the three ways I hope to contribute:
To Students
I want students to benefit from my work experience and to help them on their career journeys.
My career has been implementing ideas we teach in IEMS (using data and math to solve business problems). I’ve done this in software, consulting, and start-ups (one where I was early on the leadership team and one where I was a co-founder).
Both start-ups that I was part of went through back-to-back acquisitions. So, I’ve worked at large companies, too— ILOG (CPLEX), IBM, LLamasoft, and Coupa Software.
Most of my work has been focused on supply chain and operations projects and software for Fortune 500 companies.
To NU-Industry Connections
One of the classes I will be teaching is the Client Project Challenge. This is a Quarter-long class where teams of 3-5 Junior IEMS students work as consultants for a company or non-profit to solve a problem.
This class is well-established and does great work. Here is a 5-minute video on projects for Lurie Children’s Hospital (optimizing scheduling in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit), QSIDE ( identifying sentencing biases in the Illinois court system), and UPS (network and capacity design for a large hub). In addition, teams have helped Ferrara Candy Company develop better ways to fill bags of candy and helped Sunairio develop a sophisticated model to predict loss of wind turbine power due to icing.
I want to build on the momentum and continue to bring in great industry and real-world projects for our students. To the extent possible, I would like to extend this to help companies establish new connections to NU.
To the Professional Community
I enjoy the role of a translator between the technical and business worlds. I look forward to learning from all my NU colleagues and sharing that knowledge.
See this short YouTube video for a quick introduction to the type of work done by NU’s IEMS department. IEMS fits with what I would call Practical AI. I’m familiar with the IEMS department. I got my graduate degree from there. And I’ve been teaching there and in affiliated programs (MEM and MLDS) for many years.
Mike: your students will be very lucky to have you as their professor! :)
Congratulations for you new role Mike!