Industrial engineering professor receives IISE fellow award

yangKai Yang, professor of industrial and systems engineering at Wayne State University, has been awarded as a fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE). This award recognizes outstanding leaders in the profession who have made significant, nationally and internationally recognized contributions to industrial and systems engineering.

A fellow is the highest classification of IISE membership. Only about 500 members of IISE have reached fellow status in the organization's 69-year history, and Yang is the first Wayne State faculty member since 1985 to receive this distinction.

Yang's research has greatly impacted the fields of quality and reliability engineering, as well as health care systems engineering. His research teams over the years played key roles in developing quality monitoring and control software implemented in more than 16 assembly plants for General Motors and Chrysler. In 2009, Yang was one of the founding proposal writers of the VA Center of Applied Systems Engineering, the largest U.S. health care systems engineering group.

He currently serves as the director of the Healthcare System Engineering Group at Wayne State University, which since 2009 has been awarded more than $6.2 million for its research projects.

Yang will be formally recognized as a fellow at the IISE Annual Meeting May 20 through 23 in Pittsburgh.

IISE is the world's largest professional membership society dedicated solely to the support of the industrial engineering profession and individuals involved with improving quality and productivity.

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