The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering welcomed three new faculty members this fall.
Fatemeh Nosrat, Ph.D., joins the department as an assistant professor. She earned her doctorate in Industrial Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2022. From 2022 to 2025, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Rice University in the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research. She held a concurrent appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Nosrat’s research lies at the intersection of operations research and healthcare, with a focus on developing mathematical optimization models to support clinical decision-making in cancer care. Her expertise spans stochastic optimization, integer programming and inverse optimization.
Jia (Peter) Liu, Ph.D., joins as an associate professor with a strong background in artificial intelligence-driven manufacturing systems. He earned his doctorate in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2017 and spent the last six years as an associate professor at Auburn University. Liu’s research focuses on leveraging AI and data-driven methods to advance manufacturing science with a specific emphasis on additive manufacturing.
His work integrates AI and physics-based modeling to better understand the relationships between processes, microstructure, properties and performance, especially the fatigue performance of laser powder bed fusion. His recent interests also include manufacturing security for resilient and secure supply chains.
Liu has secured 12 external research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Science and Technology, Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense, totaling $32.8 million in funding.
Jad Atweh, Ph.D., joins the team as an instructional assistant professor. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, he earned his doctorate in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, where his research focused on human factors and ergonomics, with an emphasis on improving how teams interact with technology in high-stakes, complex systems.
His work combines eye tracking, nonlinear dynamical systems methods and cognitive systems engineering. He applies these tools to design better and smarter displays that support team coordination, situation awareness and decision-making across complex domains such as unmanned aerial vehicle systems, driving, healthcare and space operations.
Atweh teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in human factors and ergonomics, systems design and occupational safety. He integrates state-of-the-art teaching pedagogy into the classroom, holds over 10 teaching certificates and conducts research in engineering education to enhance student learning and engagement.