Teaching

Broader Teaching Interests

  • Foundations of Systems Engineering
  • Performance and Productivity Measurement and Evaluation
  • Optimization in System Design
  • Sociotechnical Research Methods
  • Decision Analysis
  • Engineering Economics
  • System Architecture

Teaching Experience as an Instructor

EMSE 2801 Fundamentals of Systems Engineering (2021 @ the George Washington University)

Description: EMSE 2801 is an introduction to core concepts in systems engineering. Lectures will provide an overview of key concepts relevant to engineered and operational systems. The focus will be on understanding systems engineering as a strategy driven discipline, where success is ultimately achieved by effectively identifying, framing, and executing a number of concurrent and sequential decisions. Students will be provided with the necessary mindset, thinking processes, tools and techniques to identify a need, explore alternatives, select a solution, and materialize it. We will explore and practice these concepts through a sequence of three participatory activities along with various assignments. Through the activities you will learn the value of upfront conceptual design, rapid prototyping, structured testing, systems analysis, balanced work, lean processes and design for manufacturability.

ENGR 5204 the Systems Engineering Capstone Research Process (2020 @Virginia Tech)

Description: The effective design of complex systems ensures the delivery of high value products, enables success in competitive markets, and ensures long-term enterprise survivability. The systems engineering process and its principals is one of the more accepted paradigms that engineers use today for system design. However, accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental changes, challenge engineers and managers to learn at increasing rates; requiring novel approaches to understand the dynamic changes that are involved with a system and its interactions. Engineers must effectively learn how to design and manage complex systems with multiple feedback loops, time delays, and nonlinear responses to their decisions. This requires the use of systems’ thinking in conjunction with a number of different modeling approaches (e.g., optimization, system dynamics, etc.) in support of the heuristics based systems engineering approaches.

In this course, students will conduct a semester-capstone research project that brings together the principles of the systems engineering, systems’ thinking, and dynamic modeling. Systems’ thinking is a school of thought that focuses on recognizing the interconnections among the parts of a whole entity (the system) and synthesizing the interconnections into a unified view of the whole entity (the system). System dynamics is a modeling approach that investigates the information feedback characteristics of complex dynamic systems to show how system structure, managerial policies and decisions, and system delays interact to influence future system growth and stability. As part of their capstone experience students will implement these principles in order to propose a new system design or improve an existing system design. The students will research the linkage between the system engineering process/principals and dynamic modeling and will formulate a qualitative dynamic model in support of the system design.

Assisted Courses as a Graduate Student @ Virginia Tech

ENGR 5004 Foundations of Systems Engineers (2016-2020)

Description: The Foundations of Systems Engineering course is designed as the first step to enable students become effective systems engineers. The course focuses on understanding systems engineering as a strategy driven discipline, where success is ultimately achieved by effectively and efficiently identifying, framing, and executing a number of concurrent and sequential choices. Treating the system as a black box, the course stresses the importance of distinguishing between operational need and system solution. Students will be provided with the necessary mindset, thinking processes, and tools and techniques to identify a need, envision alternatives, choose a solution, and materialize it.

ISE 5144 Performance and Productivity Measurement and Evaluation (2016-2019)

Description: The effective management of efficiency performance impacts the long-term survivability of systems. Therefore, it is necessary to design (or plan for) the improvement of system efficiency performance. In this course, performance is viewed as a multi-dimensional entity that potentially involves: profitability, quality, efficiency, productivity, effectiveness (outcome), innovation, quality of work life, among others. Over the last six decades, within the economics and operations research literature, productivity and efficiency performance has received extensive attention by engineers, economists, operation research analysts, and managers. These approaches offer a wide range of choices for the design of performance improvement interventions, system design in general, and address significant technological and societal issues.

ISE 5015 Management of Change, Innovation, and Performance in Organizational Systems (2015 – 2017)

Description: This course investigates performance measurement systems and the focus is on developing a solid understanding of the theoretical framework as well as applications and tools for measuring and evaluating enterprise performance. The course responds to current challenges organizations face to compete successfully in today’s environment. The course develops a blend of theory and application. Upon successful completion of the course, each student should be able to:

•Understand and define the most significant problems with performance measurement systems in organizations today. •Define performance from a multi-dimensional perspective, using several frameworks.
•Understand the role of performance measurement in the context of organizational improvement.
•Assess and analyze an existing measurement system.
•Understand how to apply structured approaches to design a performance measurement system for an organization. •Research and analyze the scholarly and practitioner literature for a focused topic within the area of measurement.
•Define and justify relevant research questions for a focused topic within the area of measurement.
•Understand applications of measurement in different types of organizations.