
U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) PhD student Emily Speakman has been selected as one of the winners of the 2017 Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for Outstanding GSIs. This award honors up to four exceptional engineering Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). Nominees must demonstrate the following: creativity or innovation as an instructor, excellence in teaching, and remarkable dedication to student success.
Emily has served as GSI for IOE 202: Operations Modeling. She was also awarded the Joel and Lorraine Brown Graduate Student Instructor of the Year award for the 2015-16 school year for her work in this course.
Her research interests include global optimization and all areas of mixed integer non-linear programming. Her current projects involve producing analytic results to guide algorithmic choices for spatial branch-and-bound. This is the workhorse algorithmic framework for non-convex global optimization problems. Emily’s advisor is Professor Jon Lee.