President's Note

It is an honor to serve as your 2016-2017 ASEM President. In this capacity, it is my goal to increase the value of ASEM membership for all of our members. We are in the process of developing our ASEM 2020 strategic plan with value driving initiatives as the key to future success and growth of the Society. At the conclusion of our annual conference, the ASEM Board of Directors welcomed Suzanna Long as our new ASEM Secretary, Charles Daniels as Southeast Regional Director, Larry Mallak as North Central Regional Director, and Brian Galli as Northeast Regional Director. Our new Functional Directors include Trish Simo Kush over Communications, Patrick Kush leading Professional Membership and James Schreiner leading Professional Development. In addition, the Board approved three Ad Hoc directors; Hiral Shah as Publications Lead, Paul Componation representing the Engineering Management Honor Society, and John Richards representing CEMAL, the Council of Engineering Management Academic Leaders. Thank you to all of our new and continuing directors for investing their time into ASEM’s success. You can find the full list of ASEM leadership at https://www.asem.org/Leadership. Please feel free to reach out to any members of our Board with ideas or suggestions. We are here to serve you.

A little background about me: I have been a member of ASEM since 1999 when I joined as a student member as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was elected as an ASEM Fellow in 2011. In addition to recently serving as Society Secretary and President-Elect, I co-hosted the 2010 ASEM International Annual Conference and have served as an Associate Editor for the Engineering Management Journal since 2012. Professionally, I serve as Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Industrial Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas and direct the Mack-Blackwell Transportation Center and MarTREC, the Maritime Transportation Education and Research Center, which focus on multimodal transportation research advances and development of our next generation transportation workforce. I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas with my husband and have four children (ages 22, 11, 9, 6). Being a mother has honed my people management and negotiation skills!

As an undergraduate engineering student, I recall many of my professors describing engineering management as the intersection between engineering science and people. I believe ASEM embodies that intersection through its production of the Engineering Management Journal, Engineering Management Body of Knowledge, and Engineering Management Handbook as the premiere publications in our field and professional development opportunities through our International Annual Conference, professional and program certification opportunities, webinars, and communication forums. As a fellow ASEM member, I hope you will take full advantage of your membership benefits this year.

ASEM held an outstanding conference in Charlotte last month. It was a pleasure to visit with many of you there. My congratulations and gratitude to our hosts and logistics committee chairs, Ertunga Ozelkan and Mike Ogle from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who provided us with the wonderful venue and excellent keynote speakers and tours. Through the efforts of our technical program committee; Suzie Long, Ean Ng, Bimal Nepal, and Craig Downing, we enjoyed a wide variety of academic and practitioner talks and workshops focused on current advances in engineering management. Please make plans to join us in Huntsville, Alabama from October 18-21, 2017 for our 2017 International Annual Conference. Abstracts are due February 27, 2017.  Visit  https://www.asem.org/2017_IAC for more details.